Links in emails!

[viper0775.livejournal.com]

kill me
kill me now!

So one of the employees at the client site I've been working for a few weeks now wanted to send out an email through the listserv.  No problem, that's what it is there for!

The problem is that his email included a URL.. the URL was correct
http://www4.whatever.org/whatever/survey
but the LINK was not..
http://www4.whatever.org/whatever/survey
I'm still not sure HOW this happened, the only thing I can think of is that he is using Word 2000 and Outlook 2000 .. when I checked the word document he copied this out of, it is correct.. but when we pasted it into Outlook it was broken!

At any rate, 34,998 people got the incorrect email..... so now the net is getting another 34,998 messages with the corrected hyperlink

=(

as I said, KILL ME

x-posted to viper0775

Comments

[zig-mover.livejournal.com]

this isn't really that terrible.

[viper0775.livejournal.com]

it is embarassing... and these people are doctors.. so more than likely once they try the first link and find it broken, they'll just dump our emails into spam... oh well! I'm just a consultant, I don't actually work here =)

(though they did give me a phone ..... not sure if that is a good sign or not!)

[jecook]

lol, and D'oh!

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I'd bet it was straight text. They added the hyperlink function and flubbed it.

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

Ok, I'm kind of odd.

The first solution I came up with, rather than re-emailing the whole jazz out... was to set up a redirect on the webserver that will be handling these requests. Make the "bad link" into a "good link". Of course, that is highly dependant upon where the typo was, exactly... :)
Of course, this is totally moot if you haven't got access to the webserver, or cannot redirect the subdomain ww4 to www4. But it was the first think to spring to my mind, and since I've had a bit of wine, everything that springs to mind is worth saying! (/sarcasm)

I still don't envy you. I agree with mouser... the user probably added the hyperlink manually and hacked off one of the leading w's.

[viper0775.livejournal.com]

the screwed up thing is, in Word the hyperlink is CORRECT....

I don't get it..

I checked it in Word myself.. then did selected all, copied and pasted into Outlook, then checked the link in outlook and its broken...

so I took it to my computer, running Office 2003, and it worked fine