Is there a character limitation for hyperlinks in Outlook?

Question

We have a web application that allows users to send out customized emails to company employees and all recipients use Outlook 2007 as their email client. In rare occasions, it is possible that an email is sent with a hyperlink that has an apparently excessive number of characters. In these instances, there are no problems except the links will not open automatically when clicked in Outlook. The only way to open is to copy the URL and paste it into a browser.

We can handle this through code to not allow users to submit excessively long URLs but we'd like to avoid this situation, if possible. Before an email is sent, the server performs a number of HTML manipulations especially on URLs. If a user has submitted a long URL, we prefer to allow the long URL and make changes elsewhere.

Has anyone encountered this situation before and is it possible to overcome the character limitation so that links will open automatically when clicked?

Answer 1

Are you sure that the limitation is in Outlook? Internet Explorer has a maximum URL length of 2083 characters. What happens if the computer's default browser is configured to be a different browser, such as Firefox or Safari, each of which has a much longer maximum URL length?

It could also be that Outlook is using IE's maximum URL limit as its own internal limit to ensure that the browser will be able to navigate to the URL the user clicks on. If that is the case then I'm afraid you might be out of luck.

Having said that, URLs that are over even 500 characters seem to be quite excessive, though I realize it might be difficult to avoid it. What exactly is in the URLs? Does it really need to be there?