[thelist] Managing URL wrap in email

[Ryan Tames]

On 4 Sep 2003 at 10:24, John Corry wrote:

> The link (URL) looks like this:
> <http://www.jacobliberman.com/maillist/maillist.php?action=confirm&ema
> il=me@ mydomain.net&conf=045e2>
> Some email clients don't deal with the URL wrapping across lines well,
> the URL is broken and the link that the email client generates from
> the URL incomplete.

> What can I do to ensure this is universally (or nearly universally)
> usable by everyone? My target audience is pretty internet illiterate,
> asking them to copy/paste the URL into a text editor to remove line
> breaks then paste into address bar would be like speaking a foreign
> language to most of them.

One of things I've been testing/playing with is, with using Apache
and PHP to parse URIs.

You can set the typical name, value pairs, into a semi-standard
URL. For instance:

the above might be interpetted like this
http://www.jacobliberman.com/maillist/confirm/me@mydomain.net/045e2/

Where [maillist] is set through .htaccess to call maillist.php,
/confirm being the action, a php function will have to parse
for it. next is the email address, or username to confirm,
and then last in the url is the session-id or confirmation number.

you could go further of course, and assign a single letter to the
action (eg: c == confirm ). Plus, the email address can be removed totally,
with regard to only the conf number.

as well, maillist and can be made smaller, and named simply 'list',
which won't confuse folks who read the url.