Browser extension to show newsletter link destinations?

July 4, 2019 5:20 AM

Are there any Chrome/Opera browser extensions that let you hover over the links in email newsletters and see the ultimate destination of the link? Generally newsletter links are wrapped in some kind of redirect URL so the sender can track which ones are clicked - but as it turns out this makes it way less likely that I will follow any link. Seems like it should be possible for an extension to do the following for me and show the destination but I haven't been able to find such a thing.
posted by yarrow to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Note that the extension would need to follow the link to find out where it goes - which would effectively mean that this extension would click on every link in every email you receive. Or at least the ones you hover over.
posted by Hatashran at 8:56 AM on July 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I was imagining that it only follow the links I hover over (or some other link-specific way of activating it). And I suppose I don't know exactly how those redirects work; I guess I was imagining that the extension follows the redirect link, which gives it the ultimate link address, & then rather than opening & rendering that page, would just show me the address. But yes, obviously it would look like a click from the perspective of the newsletter tracking setup; that's fine.
posted by yarrow at 10:27 AM on July 4, 2019

If you don't find an extension that does what you want, you could try this:

* look for a link in the email that says something like "view this email in your browser" - many emails have a link to an archived version of the mailing that you can view instead
* right-click or command-click to copy the URL from the email
* open a private browser window
* paste the URL into the private browser window
* you should now have the full contents of the email, with all the links - and with luck, they won't all be wrapped in redirects

Hope that helps a little. Tracking is so annoying.
posted by kristi at 8:50 PM on July 8, 2019 [1 favorite]