Outlook Banter - View Single Post - Invalid syntax error on some URL links in OE

**Steve Cochran**

Best I could come up with on such short notice.

Got pinged bigtime by majik. G

"PA Bear" wrote in message
...
Screen wipe, please.

Steve Cochran wrote:
No. Not me.

I hope you aren't too good a friend of my wife. She never mentioned you,
but I've been afraid something could be going on. She's never home.

"KRISTINE CAMPBELL" wrote in message
...
I am curious, Steve. Do you live in Maryland. If you do, and you live
close to Leeds road, I am a good friend of your wife. My name is
Krissy.
But, I am just curious, you may not be the only Steve Cochran in the
world.

--
KRISTINE CAMPBELL
"Steve Cochran" wrote in message
...
Try going to Start | Program Access and Defaults and make OE default
and see
if that fixes it.

steve

"Alan J Robertson"

wrote
in message news 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

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