Occasional Thoughts

Frequently I receive emails from my colleagues that contain long emails to our defect tracking tool or to user stories in XPlanner. These URLs a longer than 80 characters. I am using Thunderbird, most of my colleagues are using Microsoft Outlook. The problem with these URLs, is that a line break is inserted within the URL. Therefore only the first part is clickable, the part in the next line not. When opening the URL, only the part in the first line is used. In Thunderbird I can easily workaround this problem with the URL Link plugin. However when replying my colleagues are also unable to click on the Link in their Outlooks. After some investigations with a friendly colleague, it turned out that once again the Problem is caused by a awkward Email handling of Outlook.
Emails that are sent by Outlook users that do not use plain-text have a character set of "us-ascii". When you examine the message source of an email sent using Outlook you will probably see this:

Content-Type: text/plain;
    charset="us-ascii"

As soon as an Email has this character set, links will be breaked. Interestingly this is not only done by Thunderbird, but also by Outlook, when configured to use plain text. So this does not only annoy Thunderbird users. What makes this worse is that Outlook ignores proper charsets in received emails. When a Outlook user replies it always set this "us-ascii" charactersets, unless Outlook is configured properly. So please Outlook Users, do other people a favour and configure your program properly, when Microsoft is not able to deliver proper default settings. It's easy:

1. Open the options: Tools -> Options...
2. Click on the Mail Format tab.
3. Click on International Options...
4. Uncheck Auto select encoding for outgoing messages.

The rest of the Internet will be thankful.