URI encoding in Yahoo mail compose link

Question

I have link generating web app. I'd like to make it easy for users to email the links they create to others using gmail, yahoo mail, etc. Yahoo mail has a particular quirk that I need a workaround for.

If you have a Yahoo mail account, please follow this link:

http://compose.mail.yahoo.com/?body=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8000%2Fpath%23anchor

Notice that yahoo redirects to a specific mail server (e.g. http://us.mc431.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose). As it does, it decodes the hex codes. One of them, %23, is a hash symbol which is not legal in a query string parameter value. All info after %23 is lost.

All my links are broken, and just using another character is not an option.

Calling us.mc431.yahoo.com directly works for me, but probably not for all users, depending on their location.

I've tried setting html=true|false, putting the URL in a html tag. Nothing works. Anyone got a reliable workaround for this particular quirk?

Note: any server-based workaround is a non-starter for me. This has to be a link that's just between Yahoo and the end-user.

Thanks

Answer 1

I think you're at the mercy of what Yahoo's server does when it issues the HTTP redirect. It seems like it should preserve the URL escaping on the redirect, but isn't. However, without knowledge of their underlying application, it's hard to say why it wouldn't. Perhaps, it's just an unintended side effect (or bug), or perhaps some of the Javascript features on that page require them to do some finagling with the hash tag.