on 8/22/04 11:06 AM, Paul Berkowitz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Actually, it's a weird type of URL that includes another http:// URL within
> it. I'm not sure that's even a legal URL. Entourage is not arbitrarily
> breaking at a line end or something like that. It's linking the interior URL
> beginning with the second http.

Its not all that weird, I see them in many urls other than aol ones.
Redirect.yahoo.com is one such one, google does it at well on some of their
advertising services.

I have seen cases of http://www.example.com/index.php?page=http://etcetcetc

> If this is indeed a legal URL (the fact both exterior and interior URLs seem
> to have something to do with aol raise my suspicions mightily), then I guess
> it would be a bug in Entourage not to parse them correctly. Presumably the
> "=" immediately before the second http should indicate that it's internal
> and not the start of the link.

As per RFC and memory, you are correct that ://= are in fact not allowed
charcters in a url, however, url is a term used loosely in that spec, url
has a few "parts" to it.  If it is part of the protocol, only a-z, 0-9, and
$-_.+!*'(), are allowed.  It should also be noted that only the - and . Are
allowed in the domain name part of the url.

After all that, ZI think RFC refers to it as the "searchpart", or arguments
after a ? Or $, at that point, anything goes so long as it is URL encoded,
there are some exceptions of course, but "http:// is not one of them.

I will say, yes, aol should url encode the / to in part deal with this
issue, for example:
http://www.example.com/?redirect=http:%2F%2Fwww.example2.com%2F

This seemingly would solve the issue and not break anything on aol's side
either.  However, since every browser I tested can handle that url as a non
encoded one, I vote E-rage could better handle these cases.

> Does this happen with both plain text and HTML messages? And does anyone
> know whether one http link containing a second one is following internet
> protocols?

I don't know how it works in HTML email, I have not tried that out.

-- 
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Scott Haneda                                Tel: 415.898.2602
<http://www.newgeo.com>                     Fax: 313.557.5052
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>                          Novato, CA U.S.A.


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