Avoiding broken links in emails

When sending a long URL in an email, there is a chance that the link may become truncated or malformed by the recipient’s email program – this typically happens because some email programs wrap the URL for on-screen formatting and break the link. The recipient may not be able to click the link, or the link may point to a missing page on your site – if this happens, recipients cannot achieve their goals, such as responding to a personal invitation or returning important information to the sender.

Tips

1. Ensure the original URL is as short as possible – or use an “alias” service
   Use a service like www.TinyURL.com to create a shortened version of the URL(s) you are sending.
2. Using HTML format
   Using HTML (or Rich Text) email format allows you to add a hyperlink to the email without having to display the whole URL.
   The downside of this is that not all e-mail programs, ISP’s or networks will accept and display HTML formatted e-mail.
3. Using “Plain Text” format
   Use angle brackets around URL’s in Plain Text e-mails, for example <www.bbc.co.uk>, decreases the chance of the link being broken. This tip comes from an IEFT standards document, which specifies how URLs should be handled by email program even if they have wrapped the URL for display purposes. This tip is not 100% successful as not all e-mail clients adhere to the standard.Using “Multipart/Alternative” format.
4. Using this format allows you to send an email message in several “parts”.
   The advantage is that you can specify an HTML part and a plain text part for backwards compatibility – the recipients e-mail program decides the most appropriate part to display to the recipient.
   The main disadvantage of this approach is that the file size of emails is increased, so this is only appropriate for small/short emails, not full blown newsletters.
   To create emails in this format requires the use of specialist tools, such as ColdFusion server.
   Here is an example of how to create a multipart email using ColdFusion:

You are reading this message as plain text, because your email program does not handle HTML text.

You are reading this message as HTML because your email program handles HTML text.

1. Capturing recipients’ preference for HTML or Plain Text email
   If using “Multipart/Alternative” is not appropriate – for example when sending newsletters, or large emails – then capturing user preferences is an appropriate method.
   Allowing users to select which format to receive enables you to send the correct type of email without bundling them together like in Tip #4.

Conclusion

When communicating with your customers over the internet, you should take time to understand and make provision for end-user systems.

Using these techniques will increase the chance of your email communication reaching recipients in its intended state. They will decrease the chance of broken links in your communications which prevent customers from achieving their goals and ultimately impact the goals of your project.

References

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2007/01/sendlongurl/index.php
http://emailuniverse.com/ezine-tips/?Multipart/Alternative-Content-Type&id=184
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-5.1.4
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/6.1/htmldocs/tags-pb3.htm