alaveteli
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mysociety
Tweak presentation of links in mails
WhatDoTheyKnow gets support mail from users who have received confirmation emails saying for example:
Hi, I cannot click on the link?
Presumably users' email software/service isn't making a link clickable; sometimes this is done to protect them from dodgy things online.
It would be good to try to reduce the frequency of this problem, both to directly help our users, and cut support mail.
FixMyStreet uses text such as:
If your email program does not let you click on this link, copy and paste it
adopting that approach might help.
In one case the user's message included a quoted HTML version of the email. It appears the email provider, Yahoo in this case, had inserted a "removed-link" CSS class:
<a target=3D"_blank" class=3D"removed-link" href=3D"">https://www.=
whatdotheyknow.com/c/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx</a>
and the styling presumably had the effect described and removed the link; I can't find a good reference on the subject of what's happening and how to address it but are some suggestions that alternative formats for the links might get through at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26026601/hyperlink-in-yahoo-mail-is-not-clickable
Possibly related: #3420
I'm loathe to suggest it, but would it be feasible for us to send these emails our in multi-part (e.g. formatted HTML and plain text)? This would allow us to have some control as to how the message may be rendered on a user's email client, without breaking existing functionality.
We seem to see this issue quite often with BT email users (btinternet/btopenworld/talk21.com) - however - some other webmail clients also have a habit of disabling links from "untrusted" senders.
In the interim, I think it'd be a good idea to look at including words to the effect of what @RichardTaylor suggested in #5968 on our transactional mail. We could also suggest adding the sending domain to a trusted sender/contact list if necessary.
There's some helpful guidance from GDS that may also be of note: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design/sending-emails-and-text-messages
Further to this some users appear confused as to what we are asking them to do and why when we send a confirmation link by email.
Presumably they struggle with all sorts of web based services which do similar!
For example WhatDoTheyKnow.com we had a reply to an email including a confirmation link today saying:
This is my email address
This is not unusual.
Perhaps we need to review the text. Surely Google or Amazon (or FixMyStreet :-) ) have perfected such a message and we can take inspiration from them.
This applies to links in all sorts of emails, including for example the "New response to your FOI request" email.
+1 and adding the reduce-admin label as there's the potential to eliminate these support contacts.
An Outlook user has suggested that perhaps what's happening for them is their email software isn't making links clickable in plain text messages with:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Gmail makes the links in such messages clickable.
An Outlook user has suggested that perhaps what's happening for them is their email software isn't making links clickable in plain text messages with:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
We sent this user a "plain text" email from Gmail to experiment. This had Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8. They replied to say:
Yes, the links in that email are clickable.
But the email does show as plain text, and indeed Outlook is replying in plain text by default.
Hmm? The plot thickens.
An Outlook user has suggested that perhaps what's happening for them is their email software isn't making links clickable in plain text messages with:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8Gmail makes the links in such messages clickable.
just to note: neither @FOIMonkey or myself could reproduce this in Outlook (or Thunderbird).
I think we’d need more information to definitively say this is the cause. Getting multipart (e.g. HTML and plain text) emails as per #3420 will definitely help here.