[X4U] Clickable URL's and addresses in emails - TinyURL & preview

[Stroller]

On 23 Aug 2007, at 13:30, Doug McNutt wrote:
> ...
> Note the "delsp=yes" in the Content-Type header. It's a rather new  
> feature documented in RFC 3676 (2004) that comes well after the  
> definition of format=flowed which in turn is a way of sending  
> paragraphs instead of fixed-width lines while not offending mail  
> clients of the teletype age that can't handle the 998 characters  
> that are now allowed. Delsp requests that the receiving mail client  
> remove "extra" spaces that appear after a return character that was  
> added only to break paragraphs into short segments for transmission.

An enlightening reply - thank you

> The fellow I was working with ... now passes all of his URL's - 30  
> or so in each daily message - through tinyurl.com so they look like  
> this <http://tinyurl.com/2n7oo6> Because they are always short they  
> never get wrapped. Personally I dislike it because of malware  
> possibilities; I like to know where I'm going when I poke a URL But  
> <http://tinyurl.com> is worth a visit.

<http://tinyurl.com/preview.php> allows you to set a cookie and  
always see a message to the effect that "this tinyURL redirects to  
the site http://long.originalurl/this/that/the/next - click on the  
link to proceed".

Although I am inclined to agree with you - that the recipient of the  
URL should be "entitled" to know where the link he's clicking to  
refers to, and that having to visit the site and set the cookie  
places the "burden" of revealing this upon the recipient rather than  
the sender - this feature works perfectly and allows you always to  
know where TinyURL's links are taking you. In fact, I found it works  
TOO well, and disabled it after a week or so because I found the  
number of additional clicks required to be frustrating when I was  
creating & testing 3 or 4 tiny links (which might not uncommonly be  
required in a long message).

Stroller.