As everyone knows, Mail has an annoying habit of formatting hyperlinks so that they “break” when viewed in many other email clients.

Rachel Blackman has done Mail.app users a favour by creating a Mac OS X service that streamlines the process of solving the problem by using a service like TinyURL to create short, unbreakable hyperlinks.

Rachel’s “Shrink URL” service does the heavy lifting for you. It takes any highlighted URL in any editable Mac OS X text field, queries TinyURL and returns the shrunken URL, ready for emailing.

So, all I have to do after installing the service and restarting is highlight the URL:

Press the service’s shortcut key (⇧⌘T) and, hey presto, the shrunk URL is there:

That’s even slicker than the browser bookmarklet TinyURL provides.

You can get the service from Rachel’s web site and ask your questions or make suggestions on her forums .

She has also made the source code available and says that “anyone who finds the shrinkURL code useful for other things is welcome to it.”

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As everyone knows, Mail has an annoying habit of formatting hyperlinks so that they “break” when viewed in many other email clients.

You can read about this and why it happens in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

A poster on macOSXHints offers a complicated way around the the problem.

He recommends pasting in the hyperlink, then hitting space to turn it into a hyperlink. (This only works if you are composing in Mail’s “Rich Text” format).

Then he suggests typing “Click here” somewhere within the resulting hyperlink and deleting the rest of the hyperlink text to leave a hyperlinked “Click here”. He calls this “a small amount of work for a better presentation”.

There is an easier way. Just type “Click here” (or possibly something short but more informative) to begin with, highlight the text and then choose “Add Hyperlink…” from Mail’s Edit menu (or “Edit link” from the Contextual Menu that appears when you Control-click or right-click on the highlighted text). Paste in your URL. You’re done.

This is Hawk Wings’ Work around number two for broken hyperlinks, and will work well for people who use Rich Text. If you are composing in Plain Text, it will automatically switch your message to the Rich Text format.

People like me, who prefer to compose in plain text will want to consider Work around number one, using a service like TinyURL or SnipURL .

Some of my Windows-using workmates dislike clicking on SnipURL links as they can’t see in advance where the link will go, but they dislike it less than the broken links Mail otherwise produces in Thunderbird and Outlook.

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One way to solve the broken hyperlinks annoyance in Apple Mail 2.0 is to make your URLs and hyperlinks so short that they can’t break. A free service on the web called TinyURL can help you do this. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to the TinyURL web site - http://tinyurl.com.
2. Find the link to the little javascript applet on the front page which looks like this

onto the bookmarks bar of your browser (Safari in my case) like this:

3. Now whenever you want to send the hyperlink of a page you are browsing, click on the bookmark and it launches a new window with a short URL. For example, say you found a great tip for working around the broken hyperlink problem in Apple Mail. You click on the bookmark and it turns this URL

http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/08/08/broken-hyperlinks-work-around/

into this:

http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw

4. Cut and paste, or drag-and-drop the short URL - http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw (it does work. Click it and see!) - into your Mail message and you are done.

Now everyone can click on the links you send with ease. It’s not elegant, it’s not transparent, but it does work!

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While I love Apple Mail, one thing in particular about it bugs me; it has a habit of breaking hyperlinks so that recipients of my emails can’t just click on them the way they should be able to. When I add “http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-threads.cfm?f=38” to an email, people using other mail clients often receive it as “http://forums.whirlpool. au/forum-threads.cfm?f=38″ and that’s frustrating for everyone. One PC-minded friend of mine has recently declared that he is “just going to give up” on anything I send!

It’s easy to see how this happens with Apple Mail. At least David Duff posting on MacInTouch has an answer:

Other posters correctly point out problems with sending url’s in mail…when sending, Mail.app uses a “Content-Type: text/plain;” with the option “format=flowed”, which seems to be fairly standard. It also uses the option “delsp=yes”. the semantics of the delsp option are that if delsp=yes, then the space at the end of the line should be removed when the lines are joined together into paragraphs.

When doing “normal” line wrapping between words, where the space should be present, Mail.app ends the line with two spaces. When wrapping a line with a URL, where the space should not be present, Mail.app uses a single space. Thus, it should be possible, in theory, to correctly reconstruct the URL.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. At least not when sending mail among the most popular two mail clients on the Mac platform (namely Mail.app and Microsoft entourage). the problem may be that the delsp option is a fairly new (added between RFC2646 and RFC3676) and not yet widely adopted.

That’s the explanation, but what’s the solution? Sometimes Apple can be too innovative, and here is a perfect example! While we are waiting around for the rest of the internet to catch up to the delsp option, there must be a way to fix this? Anyone know? Do you?

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