John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has written up a detailed explanation of Leopard Mail’s new message: URL links, which allow you to link to individual email messages from other apps like Yojimbo and iCal.

He describes how the feature works, the various formats that Leopard accepts — message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e, message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e, message:<MESSAGE-ID>, message://<MESSAGE-ID> — and why message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e is the best of the bunch.

As he correctly points out there is no default menu option in Leopard Mail to access this feature. However MailTags users can find it under the Edit menu or use the keyboard shortcut ⌃⌥⌘U to copy the URL to the clipboard (in Mail.app’s default message:%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e format).

John also provides an applescript for copying the message: URL of a selected email to the clipboard in his preferred message://%3cMESSAGE-ID%3e format, which is recognised by any Cocoa-based app using NSTextView.

Read the whole post and get the applescript on Daring Fireball.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, urls, hyperlinks, applescript, productivity

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.broken hyperlinks, URLs, delsp=yes, mail.app, apple mail, workarounds, tinyURL, productivity

On the Yojimbo mailing list, Dylan Damian shared two applescripts that help to integrate the new tagging feature of Yojimbo 1.3 with del.icio.us and NetNewsWire.

They use pukka to tag a URL in either Safari or NetNewsWire, post the link to del.ico.us and then create a web archive of the page in Yojimbo complete with the same tags.

For example, if you run the first script (tip: make a Quicksilver trigger for it) when viewing a web page in Safari, it launches pukka.

Tag the page with your chosen del.icio.us tags, and submit the page.

Pukka posts the URL to del.icio.us for you and then the script creates a web archive of the page in Yojimbo with the same tags.

Yojimbo becomes in effect, an off-line backup for your del.icio.us links.

The second script does the same thing from NetNewsWire.

In a nice additional touch, the scripts get Growl to tell you that they have done their job.

It’s all very clever and works a treat.

You can get the text of the scripts from Dylan’s post in the Yojimbo mailing list archive or just grab the two scripts here (PukkaAndYojimbo.zip).

They are easiest to use (I think) if you place them in the Safari and NetNewsWire folders in your ~/Library/Scripts/Application directory. Unless you are partial to NetNewsWire’s own Script menu, in which case you are looking for ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts.

[Big hat-tips to Dylan]not apple mail, not mail.app, yojimbo, netnewswire, pukka, delicious, urls, web archives, tags, applescript

UPDATE: Due to a PEBKAC error (Wikipedia ) on my part, this feature currently only exists in internal builds of the beta. Think of it as a mouth-watering foretaste of more MailTags goodness to come in the next public beta, not as incompetence or cruelty on my part.

A week ago I posted about linkaboo, an app that provides a framework for linking to your emails in iCal, personal information managers and many other apps.

Stupidly I quite forgot that users of MailTags’ current Public Beta can (not quite yet) do the same thing, and do it better.

But the subject came up on the beta testers mailing list today, and it is good enough to share.

In the beta, all you need to do is highlight the message, press ⌃⌥⌘U or right-click on the message in the Message Viewer and select the “Copy Message Url” option:

That copies a link in the format message://EAAEED88-B00B-4B62-9A9B-F25CF4495BF8@hawkwings.net into your clipboard, which you can then paste in the personal information manager or other app of your choice, for example, Yojimbo:

Unlike linkaboo’s links these are not formatted up as hyperlinks, but they work just as well. Right-click on the link, select the “Open URL” option and the message is found.

This is better than linkaboo because:

1. It works for IMAP accounts as well as for POP ones.
2. It doesn’t involve an additional app.
3. MailTags is God’s own preferred plugin for Apple Mail.

mail.app, apple mail, mailtags, URLs, hperlinks, productivity, tips, plugins

WebnoteHappy has been updated. This clever app with an unfortunate name is a bookmark manager that allows you to tag and annotate your links.

The new version (1.2) brings support for syncing your bookmarks with your del.icio.us account, adds hot key support for Firefox and Shiira, clickable hyperlinks in the notes field and more.

All the fields in a WebnoteHappy webnote are now editable, including the URL itself.

The app sells itself partly as a native Mac OS X interface for del.icio.us and it does look nice:

You can read the full list of changes in the release notes .

WebnoteHappy is shareware (USD 24.95) and is available from the developer’s web site.bookmarks, delicious, URLs, tagging, Web 2.0, firefox, internet, not apple mail

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!broken hyperlinks, URLs, delsp=yes, mail.app, apple mail, workarounds, tinyURL

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?broken hyperlinks, URLs, bug, delsp=yes, mail.app, apple mail, line wrapping, annoyance