Broken hyperlinks in Apple Mail
Tuesday, July 26th, 2005
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?
Tags: annoyance, Apple Mail, broken hyperlinks, bug, line wrapping, mail.app, URLs