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Be Careful with Punctuation Around URLs

By Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com

Unless you are sending a message with HTML formatting where you can insert a link just like you would on a Web page, you will send URLs via email by simply typing them.

Most email clients highlight such URLs and clicking on such a link will open the address in the user's browser. They are looking for "http://" or "ftp://" in the text of the message and assume everything immediately following this up to but not including the first white space or return belongs to the URL.

Be Careful with Punctuation Around URLs

This is why you should be careful with punctuation around URLs and not write an address like this:

More about FooBar Inc. at http://email.about.com.

Instead, you could put the period after a white space character:

More about FooBar Inc. at http://email.about.com .

or surround the URL with less than and greater than signs, which never belong to a URL but delimit it:

More about FooBar Inc. at <http://email.about.com>.

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