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In my C# app, I am sending an HTML email in which the mail body contains a hyperlink that exceeds 1000 characters. When the email is received in Outlook 2007, it appears as a link (blue & underlined). But when I click on the link, nothing happens.

When I reduce the hyperlink below 995 characters, the link is clickable (opens up the URL in a browser).

I tried composing a mail in Outlook 2007 with the dummy URL exceeding 995 characters. There too it's not clickable, but when it is reduced below 995 characters it works fine.

I tried some workarounds like adding a domain in a link to a safe zone, changing Outlook preference settings, etc., but nothing worked out.

Is this a known issue in outlook 2007/2010?

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  • make sure that the links don't have spaces in the name if they do you need to wrap the name parts within the link in quotes or perhaps you may want to paste an example of your code so that we can look at it and gain a better understanding on what it is you are trying to do,... also make sure there is not restriction on name size meaning the number of characters in your link thanks
    – DJ KRAZE
    Dec 6, 2011 at 17:42
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    http://goo.gl/
    – L.B
    Dec 6, 2011 at 17:43
  • This is basically an Outlook question; the programming aspect of this is practically irrelevant.
    – NullUser
    Dec 7, 2011 at 17:56

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It is likely one of the following:

  • An Outlook limitation. There is a known limit for mailto links in Outlook, so it stands to reason there are limits for the other URLs.
  • You have not properly encoded the link with UrlEncode and it contains something "confusing" such as spaces.

A bit heavyweight, but if you are sending an internal email, you could have an internal URL shortener server. They are not too difficult to write. If you're sending external, consider calling a publicly available one.

Without knowing more specifics, I'd suggest comparing sent/received emails with URLs that work against your sent/received emails that you've generated. Perhaps something will turn up there.

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  • Thanks for ur suggestions Kit. I used UrlEncode and its not a mailto link. The same mail when i send to GMAIL, the links are working fine. So i suspect this is an issue with outlook.
    – mhn
    Dec 6, 2011 at 18:16
  • I second the recommendation for using a URL shortener. 995+ characters is getting up there... I can easily imagine buffers in software being declared like "char urlBuffer[1000]; /* big enough for most things! */"
    – James Johnston
    Dec 6, 2011 at 18:25

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