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Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

I had the same question. Until last week when I sent out a link to a google spreadsheet, and my awesome </sarcasm> Navy Marine Corps Intranet Windows XP/Outlook 2007/Exchange system broke the link across two lines (but only after it was sent), and then every single recipient (about 100 physicians) said they couldn't see the document. I now use tinyurl.

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Yeah, sending emails with absurdly-long links is just about the only use case I've found for URL shorteners. I find it particularly useful for links to Google Maps locations or direction sets.

Why didn't you use a proper link in an HTML email?

Many people still prefer plain text email. I certainly do.

I prefer text email in theory. It's cleaner, simpler. Text for messages, that's how the web was meant to work, right?

I also cringe when I purple text in Comic Sans, as well as other unmentionables.

Yet, when I want to emphasize something, I hate using asterisks. It's not semantically correct, and it looks ugly. And how do you differentiate between underline and italics?

For this reason I support HTML email.

Using asterisk for italics and underlines (_) for underlines is an age-old convention that predates the web and HTML email by years.

I much prefer plaintext only mails. Not only are they readable on any device, I also don't have to be afraid of getting my machine infected by who-knows-what.

plaintext e-mail supports format=flowed (RFC3676) which allows lines to be arbitrarily long.

The thing is, it feels like even in those cases, the service should be shortening its own URLs.

> Google needed a url shortener for its own products where we knew the shortener wouldn’t go away

Isn't that what this post is about?

Mindless copy & paste for the win!

That's just NMCI's way of showing you love.

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