[quote user="aquila"]Is there any update on this? Am I missing some patch or add-ons?[/quote]
No.
Michael -- IERenderer's Homepage PGP Key ID (RSA 2048): 0xC45D831B S/MIME Fingerprint: 94C6B471 0C623088 A5B27701 742B8666 3B7E657C
Hello,
Using Pmail 4.41. In all my e-mails, if a hyper link is more than so many characters, it hacks them all up and I can't click them.
My outgoing e-mails also get all hacked up. What I mean by this is that this is what the reciepient sees in my emails:
<Hi John,
<This is an example of how the text gets all
<hacked up
<when I send out e-mail to other people from pmail.
<It is very
<annoying to read and people really don't like it.
<Why does it happen like
<this?
Thanks much,
MP
[quote user="Mrpush"]Hello,Using Pmail 4.41. In all my e-mails, if a hyper link is more than so many characters, it hacks them all up and I can't click them.
There is a limit as to how many characters you can have in a line without wrapping but you can select all of the URL and then use the right click option "Open selection as hyperlink" to pass all the string to the browser.
My outgoing e-mails also get all hacked up. What I mean by this is that this is what the recipient sees in my emails:
This wrapping really looks like the line wrapping is turned on and not what is in the actual message body, In addition, when you reply to a message and gets the leading "> " it can put the line length beyond you line length setting. You can use the option in the reply to reformat or wrap long lines as well
<Hi John,
<This is an example of how the text gets all
<hacked up
<when I send out e-mail to other people from pmail.
<It is very
<annoying to read and people really don't like it.
<Why does it happen like
<this?
Thanks much,
MP[/quote]
I do an F5 to double click and then switch back...a bit of a PITA but I like Pegasus better than going to another email client that can handle hyperlinks perfectly.
[quote user="alkemyst"]I do an F5 to double click and then switch back...a bit of a PITA but I like Pegasus better than going to another email client that can handle hyperlinks perfectly.Repeat after me, there is no email client that have handle every URL unless it is using a browser directly to handle the process. [:)] Even then the received URL may be so hacked up in receiving it cannot be handled because the HTML added spaces to the string. I run into this ever day where even tidy URLs are hacked up by Google and Yahoo lists.
Dear All,
Thanks for the "Open selection as hyperlink..." suggestion. While it works, and it's something I hadn't known about before, it would still be nice if Pegasus recognised complete hyperlinks after reformatting like most of the other email clients I've used (Thunderbird/Outlook etc) so that I don't have to go and manually select a region then right click for a context menu, then select from a relatively large list. Even a hotkey would be an improvement.
FWIW - I've mentioned this on another thread as this, and the other issues (excessively long lines in the raw SMTP data being truncated in the message viewer) are prompting me to change email client after 15 years of Pegasus use :-(
John
[quote user="jmccabe"]
(...) it would still be nice if Pegasus recognised complete hyperlinks after reformatting like most of the other email clients I've used (Thunderbird/Outlook etc) so that I don't have to go and manually select a region then right click for a context menu, then select from a relatively large list. Even a hotkey would be an improvement.
[/quote]
I agree with you on most points, but I don't think that a hotkey would be an improvement. It wouldn't help to solve the issue.
However, I would like to add some of my thoughts, because I think that this topic is not as trivial as some people here in the community might think after reading this thread.
In my opinion breaking long URLs and making them unclickable or unusable - no matter what the reason is - is a very serious issue. The emphasis lies on the word "unusable", because wrapping URLs would be absolutely ok, if the URL would be still fully clickable and usable. I think that most users expect working links, regardless what sort of formatting is going on behind the scenes. I don't think that this is a matter of taste. It's a fundamental feature.
What is wrong with the "Open selection as a hyperlink.." suggestion?
Of course it is not user friendly. But let's have a closer look:
The first problem with this suggestion is the presumption that an average user does exactly know what an URL is, where it starts and where it ends. If he doesn't have this knowledge, he is simply lost. The question, where a URL ends, can be a tough question, especially if you imagine today's URLs with really long lines full of "arbitrary" characters and digits that make no sense. Some might say that it is not hard to find out where a URL ends: Simply watch out for an empty space. Well, this is exactly the sort of monotonous work a piece of software should do for me.
The second problem is that the average user has to be aware of the issue, that reformatting or breaking long lines could break long URLs. That means he has to read carefully his e-mails, always looking for broken links, which have to be manually transformed into usable links. If he is not aware of the problem, he will click the broken link and notice that the link doesn't work as expected. A lot of users will stop at this point, not investigating further, because they simply dont't understand why some of their links are broken and some are not.
Finally I have to say that the "Open selection as a hyperlink.." option gives the impresson of a workaround, that doesn't help to cure the problem of broken links. It is not really better than copy and paste or changing from the reformatted view to normal view.
It can't be so difficult to write a function, that scans an e-mail for URLs and makes them usable/clickable, even if some sort of reformatting is involved. Thunderbird 3 can do it.
David Harris should fix this.
> I agree with you on most points, but I don't think that a hotkey would be an improvement. It wouldn't help to solve the issue.
> However, I would like to add some of my thoughts, because I think that this topic is not as trivial as some people here in the
> community might think after reading this thread.
Agreed.
>
> In my opinion breaking long URLs and making them unclickable or unusable - no matter what the reason is - is a very serious issue.
How so. The problem is that a URL can be any length at all and an e-mail message has some very strict length restrictions. The e-mail clients that have no problem with any length are the ones using a web browser to display and process the mail.
> The emphasis lies on the word "unusable", because wrapping URLs would be absolutely ok, if the URL would be still fully clickable
> and usable. I think that most users expect working links, regardless what sort of formatting is going on behind the scenes. I don't think
> that this is a matter of taste. It's a fundamental feature.
Fundamental for a web page maybe but not fundamental for an e-mail message.
>
> What is wrong with the "Open selection as a hyperlink.." suggestion?
> Of course it is not user friendly. But let's have a closer look:
>
> The first problem with this suggestion is the presumption that an average user does exactly know what an URL is, where it starts and
> where it ends. If he doesn't have this knowledge, he is simply lost. The question, where a URL ends, can be a tough question, especially
> if you imagine today's URLs with really long lines full of "arbitrary" characters and digits that make no sense.
Software should do this but the problem is there no definition as to the end of a URL.
> Some might say that it is not hard to find out where a URL ends: Simply watch out for an empty space. Well, this is exactly the sort of
> monotonous work a piece of software should do for me.
Oh, yea, what about this one:
http://tstephenson.com/Pool Tiles/
>
> It can't be so difficult to write a function, that scans an e-mail
> for URLs and makes them usable/clickable, even if some sort of
> reformatting is involved. Thunderbird 3 can do it.
Yes because it's using Firefox to process the URLs. Works most of the time as well.
> David Harris should fix this.
If this were fixable so that this would always work then it would have been fixed. If he were to just pass this off to the OS using MSIE to handle the URLs I believe there would be howls from the Pegasus Mail community that he was opening security holes in the system.
Marc,
Just for the record, I didn't mean to suggest a hotkey would be a cure, just that (at least in the short term) it may make the 'feature' a little more usable i.e., rather than having to right-click then select the right menu item a quick keypress would do.
Overall I agree with everything you said in your message. As I mentioned though, I'd already written some of what I said on another thread so decided not to go too in-depth here.
Interestingly though, what I think I forgot to mention here is that I've been using the F5 technique described earlier and, in fact, have found that there are cases where that doesn't work. I have found numerous emails where the first part of a line-broken hyperlink is highlighted in "Reformat long lines" view but, when I press F5 to toggle the reformatting off, the hyperlink is not recognized at all!
I think both these issues should be fixed.
[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]How so. The problem is that a URL can be any length at all and an e-mail message has some very strict length restrictions. The e-mail clients that have no problem with any length are the ones using a web browser to display and process the mail.[/quote]
For what it's worth, the main issue in the original message of this thread is that long URLs (well, longer than the width of the message viewer) that are recognised as URLs with "Reformat long lines" toggled off, are broken when "Reformat long lines" is toggled on. Ultimately this suggests that something isn't working properly, or is just inadequate. If the URL can be completely recognised from the original message such that a non-reformatted version is displayed correctly, Pegasus ought to be able to use that information to render and handle a reformatted version correctly. I would be prepared to bet there are many email clients out there that can do that, without using a web browser to process the mail.
[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]> The emphasis lies on the word "unusable", because wrapping URLs would be absolutely ok, if the URL would be still fully clickable
> and usable. I think that most users expect working links, regardless what sort of formatting is going on behind the scenes. I don't think
> that this is a matter of taste. It's a fundamental feature.
Fundamental for a web page maybe but not fundamental for an e-mail message.[/quote]
Fundamental features change over the years; in the past it wouldn't have been fundamental for a car to have disc brakes but as more and more manufacturers offered that option, it became something that you really couldn't sell a car without. The same could be said for clickable hyperlinks in a graphical email client; all the clients I've used recently have successfully coped with long hyperlinks being reformatted internal to the mail client except for Pegasus. If I was using a plain text, terminal based email client nowadays I would not expect such a feature, but I'm not.
[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]> The first problem with this suggestion is the presumption that an average user does exactly know what an URL is, where it starts and
> where it ends. If he doesn't have this knowledge, he is simply lost. The question, where a URL ends, can be a tough question, especially
> if you imagine today's URLs with really long lines full of "arbitrary" characters and digits that make no sense.
Software should do this but the problem is there no definition as to the end of a URL.[/quote]
This has veered off a little from the original issue to a more general case of handling URLs. That's ok and you are, of course, right about the format of URLs. It is not enough to simply recognise the first space as that could still be part of the URL, however I wouldn't expect any mail client to be able to do that, even if, as you suggested, it were using a web browser to process the message. There's no way that, in a plain text original message, the sort of link you provided could be completely recognised as a URL. E.g. if I write it here as http://stephenson.com/Pool Tiles/ I would be surprised if it would be recognised, however stick it within an <a href="blah blah"> html tag and it's a different matter. The point though is that, in plain text, even a web browser can only use the information it has available to determine the extent of a link.In my opinion it is reasonable for a mail client to do its best under those circumstances and if it only highlights up to the space (as Microsoft Outlook does) then so be it.
[quote user="Thomas R. Stephenson"]> David Harris should fix this.
If this were fixable so that this would always work then it would have been fixed. If he were to just pass this off to the OS using MSIE to handle the URLs I believe there would be howls from the Pegasus Mail community that he was opening security holes in the system.[/quote]
Potentially, however we're discussing two issues here now.
1) The fact that Pegasus displays and processes URLs longer than the width of the reader window differently depending on whether "Reformat long lines" is on or off. We're not talking here about URLs longer than 1000 characters (although, as I mentioned in my other message earlier today on a different thread, Postel's Law should come in to play there!), nor are we talking about URLs with spaces or weird characters in them. We are simply talking about cases where, e.g. if I have my reader window set to display 50 characters wide, a 60 character URL will be broken over two lines with "Reformat long line" on, and only the first line will be interpreted as a hyperlink (and clicking on it won't work because the remaning 10 characters are needed). This should be fixed.
2) General assumptions on how to determine the extent of a URL. In HTML formatted mail this is easy; it's the content between the quotes in the href attribute of the <a> tag. In plain text you have to guess that the first non alphanumeric character is the end of the URL.. As I said above, we need to assume that the email client will do its best but can't expect every possible URL to be recognisable in this way (in fact, it's reasonable to assume that Pegasus handles most of these cases without too many problems, as long as "Reformant long lines" isn't on!).
I thought I'd add an example, so below is an image showing the rendering of a long URL in Pegasus and Thunderbird (sorry about the difference in scaling!). The message was created in Pegasus using plain text mode, and the URL inserted using "Paste special" with the NOT wordwrapped option then sent to myself.
The image of Pegasus is with "Reformat long lines" on and you can see that only the first line is treated as a URL (with "Reformat long lines" off, the URL is recognised properly.
In Thunderbird, set to wrap to the window size, there is no such problem.
I'm resuming this old post as I'm facing the same issue now, with Pmail 4.7.
The solution I'm using is Paste Special, even though for sake of simplicity this should be handled automatically by the client itself.
Is there any update on this? Am I missing some patch or add-ons?
