Links not working in email notifications

[thirdkingdom]

This isn't something that needs to be addressed, if it is possible to address it from your end, but I'm curious as to the answer. I recently got a new phone, and set up all of my email accounts to be sent through the gmail app. In the past email notifications from US were addressed to my yahoo app, and whenever I got a notification there was a hyperlink in the email I could click on to go to the relevant post.

I still get the notification emails but the hyperlink doesn't work now that I'm using the gmail app. In other words, the link to the post is still in the email, but it doesn't hyperlink (I can't click on it and be sent to the US page). However, in email notifications from another site the hyperlinks still work, so I figured it might be something on this end.

[rredmond]

I'm not a tech guy, but isn't that something that needs to be enabled in the app? So in Settings there's something like "enable clickable links" or "open web links upon clicking" or something like that? I know it can be turned off (an on) in WORD and the like, so that's my guess with your issue. I'm not sure my answer is 100% right, but I'm pretty sure it's an app issue and not an issue with the email if that makes sense.

[thirdkingdom]

I'm not a tech guy, but isn't that something that needs to be enabled in the app? So in Settings there's something like "enable clickable links" or "open web links upon clicking" or something like that? I know it can be turned off (an on) in WORD and the like, so that's my guess with your issue. I'm not sure my answer is 100% right, but I'm pretty sure it's an app issue and not an issue with the email if that makes sense.

Maybe? But in the same app the email links from another game forum are enabled (and it uses the same email address).

[rredmond]

Sorry, I did say I wasn't a tech guy. Yeah that doesn't sound right; if it works for one it should work for the others.
Ok, social worker out!
Seriously though, someone here will be able to help, I'm pretty certain. Good luck tk!

[thirdkingdom]

Sorry, I did say I wasn't a tech guy. Yeah that doesn't sound right; if it works for one it should work for the others.
Ok, social worker out!
Seriously though, someone here will be able to help, I'm pretty certain. Good luck tk!

And like I said, it's not a big deal; I'm just curious.

[Zhym]

Hi. I am a tech guy.

I think what's happening is that the Unseen Servant's notification e-mails contain bare URLs. Some mail clients convert those to links, others don't. It sounds like the Google mail client is one that doesn't.

The reason e-mail from other sources are still coming through as links is that those e-mails probably are sent out as links, so they don't rely on the mail client to "linkify" them.

For an example of what I'm talking about, here is what might be included in an Unseen Servant e-mail:

Code: Select all

http://www.unseenservant.us/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9202

Some mail clients will convert that into a link. Others won't.

If a sender wanted to make that a link, the e-mail would contain something like:

Code: Select all

<a href=http://www.unseenservant.us/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9202>http://www.unseenservant.us/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9202</a>

or

Code: Select all

<a href="http://www.unseenservant.us/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9202">Links not working in email notifications</a>

Those will show up as links in almost all mail clients because the sender has marked them as links.

[ToniXX]

Zhym might be on to something, but I've been using the Gmail mobile app (Android) and the URLs work as links no problem.

What platform are you on? Android? iOS?

[Zhym]

I'm fairly sure that the links aren't being sent as links. At least, when I check the raw source of my e-mail notifications of PMs, I see bare URLs, not links. I can't rule out that something along the line is stripping out the HTML tags, but I don't think that's happening. I don't see a profile option to set whether e-mails should be sent in HTML or plaintext, either.

I don't have the Gmail app, so I'm no help there, but maybe there's a configuration setting controlling whether to convert URLs to HTML links?

I only have notifications from PMs, not forum posts, so maybe that's a difference?

[Zhym]

I did some more testing to make sure I could see the difference between e-mails sent with links and those that were "linkified" in the client. And now I'm sure that this is on the client end and that the forums aren't actually sending links, at least in my case. The notification e-mails I get are all of type text/plain, which doesn't support markup. As I said above, maybe there's a setting to toggle whether to send notification e-mails as plain or HTML, but I can't find it.

Here are the relevant headers from the e-mail:

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Reply-To: <admin@unseenservant.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

[thirdkingdom]

Zhym might be on to something, but I've been using the Gmail mobile app (Android) and the URLs work as links no problem.

What platform are you on? Android? iOS?

Android.

On my old phone I had the Yahoo mail app (my email address is at yahoo) and the links converted to a hyperlink. But on this phone I decided to consolidate all of my emails into the single gmail app and that's when the issue* started.

*If you can call it an issue. It's only mildly inconvenient.