Send Long URLs Over Email
Some websites generate extremely long URLs. When you email someone a page with that URL, your email treats only the first line displayed as the address, so clicking on it results in failure. The typical solution of copying and pasting multiple lines of the URL is tedious. TinyURL.com offers a better solution.
Steps
- Go to a website called TinyUrl at www.tinyurl.com.
- In Internet Explorer, select the View menu, and highlight Toolbars. Ensure that the Links option has a checkmark next to it. If it doesn't, click on the word "Links". You should now see a row below your navigation controls on the browser, which may contain the names of some websites.
- On the tinyurl homepage, it should say Add TinyURL to your browser's toolbar, and below that it should have a link saying TinyURL!. Click on that link, hold the mouse button down, and drag the link onto the Links Toolbar on your browser (just below the navigation bar). You should see a link to TinyURL on that bar.
- Surf to a page with a long URL.
- Click on the TinyURL link on your browser's toolbar.
- You will be directed to a page on the TinyURL site. TinyURL has assigned a short URL in the form of tinyurl.com/XXXXXX which will forever redirect automatically to the long URL you were previously on.
- Now, when you want to email someone that URL, you can just copy and paste the short tinyurl.com/XXXXXX URL into the email. In fact, TinyURL has automatically copied it to your clipboard.
- When someone receives your email, and clicks through the TinyURL link, they will automatically end up on the page with the long URL.
Tips
- If you use Microsoft Outlook, you can also copy and paste a long URL into an HTML-formatted e-mail. This will ensure that the whole URL is linked instead of just the first line. To send an HTML e-mail, select Format > HTML before composing.
- A similar website is snipurl.com. This site lets you create an account, which you can then use to track all the "snipped" URLs that you have created.
- TinyURL is a free service, so if you like the service, consider donating to them.
- If you or other people are suspicious, you can use a preview.tinyurl.com URL and they will see the page it links to. You can also get a cookie from that page that turns automatic preview on.
- If you don't want to create a link in your browser that automatically does it, you can just past the URL in the specified field on the home page.
Warnings
- Be careful of the security and privacy issues of using sites like TinyURL and SnipURL. Once you provide the URL that you want to "snip," those sites will know which websites you were visiting.
Things You'll Need
- An Internet browser
- An Internet connection
- A URL
