Action for sending URLs

May 12, 2007 3:47 PM

I send a lot of URLs via email. Inevitably the url's are so long I have to first go to a site like tinyurl.com and truncate the url and then copy that new url and then paste that into my email. Are there other options?

Does an action exist for OS X users that would automatically highlight the url and then take it to tinyurl.com and then get the compressed url and copy it and then paste it into a designated email app's "new email" template?

posted by zenpop to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Try this out
posted by neustile at 3:51 PM on May 12, 2007

Extensions if you are using Firefox...
posted by IndigoRain at 4:30 PM on May 12, 2007

Personally, I don't like when people send me tinyurl links, because I like having some idea of what site I'm going to end up at.

If you enclose the link in less-than/greater-than signs (<http://somesite.com/longurl/.../>), most mail clients won't wrap the text, even if they otherwise would.
posted by CrayDrygu at 4:45 PM on May 12, 2007

I've noticed that my e-mail client, Thunderbird, will not break lines that are "quoted" from previous e-mails, as in a reply e-mail. Since the "quoted" sections are actually marked by having '>' symbols at the beginning of each line, I tried just putting '> ' (greater-than sign followed by a space) before very long URLs. It works for me.

The '>' (greater than sign) must be the first thing on the line, i.e., not preceded by a space or tab character.

I believe I've used this technique in other e-mail clients with success (old Netscape mail, Opera mail). I've not tried it in Outlook, AOL Mail, or any web-based e-mail clients, and would love to know if it worked there, too.
posted by amtho at 4:50 PM on May 12, 2007

As Cray said, and I agree with him regarding tinyurl.. just use some pointy brackets.
posted by Gideon at 6:17 PM on May 12, 2007

As a side note, with tinyurl you can add "preview." to the beginning (ie, preview.tinyurl.com/blah) and it'll reveal the full url without you having to actually load the page.
posted by lhall at 6:40 PM on May 12, 2007

Those of you who don't like TinyURL links - if you have Firefox/Thunderbird, there is a Greasemonkey script to show what URL the TinyURL goes to. Or what lhall said.
posted by IndigoRain at 8:05 PM on May 12, 2007

Couldn't you just, instead of putting in the 'raw' link, do it as a named hyperlink? E.g., "Google" instead of "http://google.com".

I don't know how easy this is with your mail client, and I usually don't have problems with long URLs anyway, but it seems like the best bet to me.
posted by fogster at 11:33 PM on May 12, 2007

If you do use TinyURL, there is nothing to keep you from adding a # and a comment.

e.g.

http://tinyurl.com/24d47u#MetaFilter_Thread
posted by kindall at 2:04 AM on May 13, 2007

"The recommended way to write URLs inside e-mails and other plain-text documents to make them clickable even when the lines are wrapped or white space is added during transmission should be <URL: http://www.gnu.org >. Writing <URL: followed by a space before the URL and space and > after the URL ensures that the URL is recognized correctly as being clickable in all cases when it is not wrapped, and recognized by a steadily increasing amount of e-mail clients when it is wrapped."
-- How to write URLs in e-mails considerately
posted by JoddEHaa at 4:15 AM on May 13, 2007