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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I’m somewhat surprised that enterprise email solutions still allow links… like, at all, in general.

The servers should scan emails for links and not allow them. If a link somehow slips through, the client should not render it as something you can click on and follow.

On work machines where everything is managed by IT, there shouldn’t be any need to send links around anyway. If anyone thinks they need to send a link around as an ongoing process, then that’s the sign that the process still needs to be designed.

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>I’m somewhat surprised that enterprise email solutions still allow links… like, at all, in general.

Completely agreed, and I think it's telling that so few email clients or webmail services actually allow you to always render as plain text.

This sounds quite short sighted to me. You can’t imagine needing links being sent in everyday workflow at the office, yet I can’t imagine not using links in emails.

How would people interact with vendors and salespeople that send links to product specs, troubleshooting articles, etc?

If it is a vendor you are buying hardware from, they could send a part number, for example. The workflow should be go to their site, and search it up.

I don’t think it is short sited. Actually, I think if it has a flaw it is the opposite one. Workflows that involve mailing around links are convenient for quick little in-the-moment thrown together actions. It’s liberating. I’ve done it too, sure. But, in the long run everything should be integrated somehow or another and sending links should not be necessary. One might say it is ridiculous to expect every process to reach that end state. Possibly true, but it is a good goal…

In general, if a program is not a Web browser, I do not want that program getting clever with displaying a URL as an active link. Just show it as the URL, https prefix and all, so I can see where it will be taking me if I copy it into the browser. (This is one of my very few gripes with Google docs.)

I don't know how exactly IT at work did it, but all links in emails (except some internal links) get replaced with a link to an url 'checker', I guess to block if the link goes to a known phishing domain (I guess, I don't think any link got blocked that way). Issue is, the original link is part of the url and sometime got mangled and it's annoying when you just want to copy the link to paste it somewhere else.

Many corporations do have systems that click every link in inbound emails to check them, I assume against huge lists or heuristics of suspicious domains. Not to different from “endpoint security” solutions that check every link you click in a browser.

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