Apple Mail and Broken URLs
I am using Apple mail and love it. Except many people complained to me repeatedly that sometimes when I send long URLs they break into several lines and they could not click on them. Today I finally decided to investigate what's goind on.
Apple Mail sends plain text messages with the following Content-Type headers:
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
delsp=yes;
format=flowed
This is perfectly legal, per RFC-3676. It does break long lines, but in a manner, that other mail client which undertand this format could reconstruct them back. For example if another Apple Mail is used to read the message, it looks perfectly OK:
Unfortunately, other popular clients do not understand this, as of today. Gmail:
Outlook 2003:
In examples above, I also tried to enclose the long URL in angle brackets, as recommended by some sources. This format is defined in RFC 2396, Appledix E: "Recommendations for Delimiting URI in Context". As you can see, this did not help either.
It looks like that as of right now there is no sure way to put long URLs in messages send by Apple Mail without a risk of them being broken down, when displayed by popular mail clients. Common workardound is to use services like TinyURL to map them to shorter URLs.
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notbrainsurgery) wrote,
