Email links on contact from not working

[HCHTech]

I have a customer who is having a website developed by someone. I haven't met them yet, but that will happen soon. It's a Wordpress site, and they have a contact form that sends an email to my customer. In any event, part of the data gathered is an email address and a website address.

When my customer receives the contact email, the email address and the web address aren't "clickable". They come through as plain text.

I had the customer forward me one of the emails, and they aren't clickable on my system either. The web developer says they work for him. So...I've tried various combinations, and it turns out that they work when received by a Mac, but don't work when received by a Windows machine. I've tried both Gmail and a couple of versions of Outlook, as well as Outlook.com. I've tried 3 different browsers including a fresh install of Chrome with no extensions.

If I open the message on a Mac (in Safari, through Gmail, for example), the links work. If I open the message on a Windows machine (through any browser, through Gmail, for example), they don't. They also don't work when sent to a non-gmail address and opened in two different versions of Outlook on a Windows machine.

When I view source on the message, I don't see an href tag before the link like I might have expected. Is that the problem? And if it is, then why does it work on a Mac?

I'd to have something more constructive to say to the developer other than "it's broke - fix it".

 

[TurricanII]

It sounds like the mail client is not spotting and hyperlinking email addresses. If the email is sent as plain text then not all email clients/web browsers will hyperlink it. Ask the web dev to try prefixing mailto: to the email address perhaps? Other than that can he wrap it in the appropriate a/href/mailto tags and send as html email?

 

[fencepost]

This is a combination of how the address is being formatted (by the sending software) and how forgiving the client software is (even if it's a web-based client built in JavaScript).

The simple solution is that the software should format the address with

Firstname Lastname <email@address.com>​

That should take care of the issue as far as most email clients are concerned.

 

[Moltuae]

Which WP plugin is being used for the contact form?

My guess is that that the contact form plugin is sending out in plain text and that the reason the links are clickable in some software and not others is simply because the software is recognising that the plain text message contains email/web addresses and is converting them into links.

 

[HCHTech]

Yeah, that all makes sense - thanks for the comments. I realized after my hurried post that some details might be helpful - sorry about that.

It does come out in what looks like a table. Here is the section with the email address as an example:

<tr style="background-color: rgb(247, 247, 247);"><th style="padding: 7px 9px; text-align: left; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid;">Email</th><td style="padding: 7px 9px; text-align: left; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid;">someguy@verizon.net</td></tr>

and here is the section with the weblink:

<tr style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><th style="padding: 7px 9px; text-align: left; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid;">Attached Copy of TB Test</th><td style="padding: 7px 9px; text-align: left; color: rgb(68, 68, 68); border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid;">http://somewebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/formidable/MantouxTestResults.doc</td></tr>

So, the folks that opined about plain text are right. Obviously some platforms find and identify the links ok (particularly OSX, I guess) and some don't (everything else I tried on a Windows box).

I'll ask the developer to add the code so the software on the receiving end doesn't have to guess. Thanks everyone.

 

[fencepost]

A professionally written Web page should work well on IE 9-11 (Windows)

Actually, I'd be willing to abandon support for IE below 11 at this point - Microsoft has, and anyone using those older browsers should upgrade. If they're using software that still requires IE10 or earlier, they should also be looking at upgrading that - and if the vendor can't or won't support newer browsers it's time to get new software.

 

[ChrisTech]

How about "Only 9.5% of Web users have the same type of computer as you. If you can't be bothered to test that your Web sites work for the other 90.5% then I'll advise my client to find a developer who will."

We're seeing this trend more and more - for some unfathomable reason many Web developers are favouring Macs (perhaps Web developers are cool?) and only testing on their own machine, or coding under the assumption that because they personally believe that Chrome is the best thing since sliced bread then any Web site that doesn't work on other browsers is a clear indication that the browser needs to be "upgraded" to Chrome. (We get that a lot from cloud-based accounting software. MYOB and Xero - I'm looking at you.)

A professionally written Web page should work well on IE 9-11 (Windows), Edge (Windows 10 only), Safari (Windows, iOS and OSX), Firefox (all platforms), Chrome and Chromium (all platforms), Opera (all platforms), and whatever Android browser Samsung are bundling these days. The Web developer needs to have tested on all of these which means that they need to have a Mac, Windows PC, Linux box and a couple of phones or tablets (a total of maybe $2,000) and a willingness to work with them all; not having this equipment available is a major red flag, and not being at least nominally platform-agnostic is another.

Or getting a Sauce labs account https://saucelabs.com/
..and test in virtual browsers/devices.

Still miss the Adobe testing though.....

 

[HCHTech]

Or getting a Sauce labs account

That's awesome - I sent that to a couple of folks I know who do development. Thanks!!

 

[fencepost]

IE8 is lingering Windows XP systems. For businesses if they can't be replaced due to legacy software they shouldn't be connecting to the Internet anyway. For home users they're a ticking time bomb - the only browser still getting updates is Firefox (MS abandoned it 2 years ago, Google sometime in the past few months I believe), but even that won't protect you against all possible remote exploits - anything related to fonts would probably be a real danger area, and there's not going to be OS patches to resolve issues.

IE9 and IE10 are either on Vista systems or are on Windows 7 and just need to be updated to 11. Since security updates for those stopped in January I believe, they're in a similar boat to IE8.

When a refurbed Windows 7 Pro machine with an i3 or i5 can be had for less than $200 $150 nobody should be spending on fixing up old systems. Infected? I'm not going to try to clean it, I'm going to offer to sell you a new system for not that much more than my cleaning charge and I'll migrate your data files over to it at no charge with Fab's. I can't migrate all your (old, unsupported) software, but if you can't afford Office Home & Student or Office365 I can offer you LibreOffice which will open your files and look a lot more like Office2003 than the newer Microsoft Office products do.

Heck, even if you have a gamer with an old box, a 4GB Xeon (comparable to a first-gen i3) with (crappy) nVidia graphics card is $125. That'll probably run their XP-era games better than whatever they're on right now.