Robert Aldwinckle wrote:
Let's examine your examples in more detail then.

Are the examples you gave from HTML E-mail?
How did you extract them? E.g. with right-click Copy Shortcut
or by capturing the text portion of the anchor?
(I'm thinking that HTML source may be the problem
in a similar way that phishing sites exploit it.)
Also a common problem with HTML links is for posters
to try pasting in a partial URL and then editing it,
not realizing that they are only editing an anchor's displayed
text, not the actual HREF itself. In order to do that
in OE they should use the Edit menu's Remove Hyperlink
command, edit the text and then when it is converted
to a link the HREF and the text will be the same.

Thanks very much for all your advice, Robert. The problem is actually
occuring on my parents' machine - I use Outlook myself and don't have any
problems with it. Unfortunately I've only been home for the course of this
week and have been trying to fix it while I was here - I think it may all be
a bit too complex for them to try scripting, etc.

The examples of sites not working all come from e-mails and newsgroup
postings. The majority of these are NOT HTML based, but in fact plain-text.
It's possible that these are ALL plain text, I can't quite remember for
certain. This certainly confirms that the problem is not due to a malformed
URL in the message itself. As I mentioned it seems to be the case that
sometimes a link will work, other times it doesn't. Many of the links are
from automated plain-text forum e-mails notifying me of an update to a
thread I'm watching - this may however just be because most of the links I
click on in e-mails are in those types of e-mails!

Sometimes the links work, yet in the very next e-mail I'll find it doesn't
work. These are e-mails sent from the same site and the same server.

Interestingly it seems that right-click and copy shortcut does NOT work on
links where I've clicked and received an 'invalid syntax error' message. I
instead have to highlight the text and do a copy and paste.

I've clicked on a number of links in Firefox (I use the portable verion on a
USB stick to monitor some newsgroups) and have had no issues at all with
links there.

So in summary it seems to be a problem with URLs in plain text e-mails that
OE is automatically turning into links. It does not seem to be related to
the URLs themselves as far as I can tell - sometimes a URL will work and
then refuse to work a few hours later. Almost identical URLs will work/not
work with no discernable pattern.

At least the workaround of highlight, copy, paste does work, it's just
annoying that the problem is so inconsistent!

Any suggestions from the MVPs? - is this linked to the MSKB article I
referenced initially?

Cheers

Alan