MS Outlook - breaking links in HTML emails

This is really weird and I haven't been able to find any references to similar problems via Google or MS site.

I'm sending an HTML email. The basic construct is a table with the left column containing navigation links and the right containing the body which also contains links. The links in the body work correctly, but the links in the left column are getting corrupted somehow. The links are in this format:

http://www.example.com/page.php?foo=bar&bar=foo

but in the left column they are corrupted to

http://www.example.com/pagephp?foo=bar&bar=foo

Notice the '.' between 'page' and 'php' is gone. Again, this doesn't happen to the links in the right column.

Yes, the links are correct in the source before being sent (in fact some of the links are the same in both and are, in fact, generated from the same variable).

Now, the email contains a multipart mime with the text version listed first. Thinking this might some how be causing a problem I removed the text portion but no joy.

Anybody have similar experiences or seen mention of this elsewhere?

Hello,

has anyone solved this problem?? I am having the exact same problem. basicly outlook is droping a period, exactly as above!!@%$#!^%

I was hoping someone out there has a fix!

Cheers,
Stonie.

id say, just stop using outlook.

I agree that outlook is a crap email client…

BUT…

You can't control which mail client is used, same as you can't control which browser people use. As every developer knows, making your code cross/browser/email client/platform/language is a major challenge.

Please join us in the real world and try not to post non-helpful/unconstructive posts.

Cheers,
Stonie.

Ouch Ronin, he gotcha on that one...

Maybe Microsoft should take a lesson from this thread.. did anyone ever try to look at the support site in Opera... ANYWAY.. back to the topic at hand:

1. What version(s) of Outlook have you seen to be affected?
2. How are you creating the HTML (perl, PHP, etc)?
3. Do you happen to have a broken sample message?

You know, I did get this resolved, but I can't remember what the problem/solution ended up being...

heheh. i know. i was just feeling cranky this morning.

stonie, sorry for that post man. i'm gonna try and be a good ronin from now on

I just now noticed that the thread started in December!

I seemed to have found a workaround. After trawling the web for information and finding very little. I did read a post somewhere about adding Square brackets, as some mail components drop a strings that are longer than 72 chars? So it appears to be a mail component problem rather than mail client problem.

I can’t be sure why the square brackets work (which I find annoying) but the square brackets do stop the mail component stuffing up.
The component I’m using is M$ CDONTS.

Examples:

This is the string being fed into the component:

http://****.com/activate.asp?s=0&i=764871E88E00493DA9F254923C527C34

This is the string I get out:

http://****.com/activateasp?s=1&i=764871E88E00493DA9F254923C527C34
(It’s dropped the period just before the file extension)

Adding the square brackets to the string. Stops the period being dropped. Below is the same string with square brackets, which comes out fine.

<http://****.com/activate.asp?s=0&i=764871E88E00493DA9F254923C527C34>

I tried sending as plain text instead of MIME, but that stoped the client interpreting the link at all.

So basically I don’t know why this works but it does.
I have tested it in several email clients and also web based mail such as hotmail and it works fine. I can’t be sure it will work everywhere, but its good enough for me.

Thank for your help guys and roninblade don’t worry everyone has their off days!

Later
Stonie.

Erps.. actually it's sort of considered a sound practice to use angle brackets in URLs that go into mail programs... I just sort of assumed that you were already doing it..

Well it's news to me?

It doesn’t seem to be common practice, for instance this forum doesn’t use them?

Stonie.