3rd April 2001
Sending e-mail newsletters in HTML is fun to do. I can call images from the Web, tweak a message's layout, change its colors, and use URLs of any length without fear of wrapping. Has that ever happened to you? When you type a lengthy URL into a text message, it may break before it reaches your recipient. According to RFC2396 (details at RFC.NET), you can append the address with angle-brackets to alleviate problems. Ya know, the less-than and greater-than symbols? Surround a Web address with them before you send it; if your mail client is compliant, it won't wrap that URL. I tried it in Outlook, and it didn't seem to work. However, I've received messages from other people who have successfully employed this trick. The secret may lie within the MIME encoding of the message; Quoted Printable and Base64 seem to ignore automatic word wrapping (at least, in Outlook 2000). Getting back to the breaking news, certain Web addresses (and FTP directories) contain spaces within them; flank 'em with angle-brackets and you'll be set. When you can't use the space bar (or an angle-bracket) to represent a space in a URL, use the following string instead: "%20" (sans quotes). Thanks to TIDBIT.COM's Adam Engst for the insight!