On Dec 21, 2007, at 3:18 PM, Eric Chevalier wrote:
On 21 Dec 2007 11:03:47 -0800,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Edward Jaffe) wrote:
With an email client that understands hwo to properly handle URLs, no
extra effort is required. You simply post in the URL -- whether
long or
short -- and it is not wrapped. For example, this should
(hopefully) not
wrap:
http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/
0,289483,sid80_gci1280330,00.html?
track=NL-576&ad=611332&asrc=EM_NLT_2483474&uid=279318
I use Forte Agent version 4.2, and it had no problems with your URL.
However, Agent does _not_ seem to handle the wrapped URL in Ed G's
message:
<http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/general/
0,295582,sid80_gci1286765,00.html?
track=NL-576&ad=617990&asrc=EM_NLN_2777580&uid=6570353>
that triggered my response.
After a little digging, I noticed that Ed G's message contained the
header:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
The first two text lines containing the URL contain trailing blanks,
the third line does not. So Ed G's message does appear to be properly
formatted for RFC 3676, Content-Type "text/plain", "delsp=yes" and
"format=flowed". Any newsreader/e-mail client that correctly supports
RFC 3676 should remove the trailing blanks and concatenate all three
lines into one.
Clicking on that wrapped URL in Agent, Thunderbird tried to go to the
URL:
http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/general/0,295582,sid80,00.html
So, it looks like Agent did process the wrapped lines more or less
correctly, but then decided to stop parsing the URL after the ".html"
text. I guess that might be considered a bug in Agent, but I'm not
sure there's an RFC defining how e-mail clients should interpret a
character string that might be a URL. Obviously, "http://"; is a pretty
good clue to the start of the URL. I guess Agent took a bit of a
shortcut when trying to determine the end of the link.
After reading all of the responses to my initial note, I've come to
feel that putting both the full URL and a tinyurl link in a message is
a reasonable compromise. Yes, I understand that tinyurl links do have
some security exposures, but in a small community like IBM-Main, I'm
willing to be pretty trusting.
---------------SNIP----------------
Eric:
I am somewhat confused about the URL now. It appears to me that it is
probably a (receiver) emailer issue rather than a sender or a server
issue.
Since some email programs appear to be broken (BAD?). I thought this
was discussed earlier on here and (IIRC) that by putting <> before
and after the wrapped URL the emailer program was "supposed" to
unwrap the URL correctly. This is not (apparently) true.
So we are pretty much left to asking people to cut and paste or take
a chance being phished. Some people seem to think that if you were a
member IBM-MAIN it shouldn't happen. I would like to think that it is
the case, BUT take the example of Phil's badly mangled URL that he
posted here. When I *COURTEOUSLY* sent him (privately) a note saying
it didn't work I got back a rather curt email. So, brotherly love
does not seem to work on here and PHISHING is very probably likely.
The way it stands now is lets drop this subject matter and just post
real URL's and let people cut & PASTE it into their browser of choice.
Ed
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