‘About: XXXXX’ line hyperlink in an Outlook mail (Office 97 + Windows 98)

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Hi!

I ve been teasing my brains with this one that’s pretty much more of a challenge than a real problem.

Whenever you type, for example, “about: whatever[PercentTwenty] you[PercentTwenty]want,[PercentTwenty]dood” (*) in I Explorer’s address bar and hit enter, I Explorer will show a blank screen with the text “whatever you want, dood”. After “about:”, you can type anything (linking the words with [PercentTwenty] if there ‘s more than one word) and you’ll have it in your explorer window, like that. It also works if you do the same in Win Explorer’s address bar (will launch I explorer and do the trick).

* 1) without the quotes and 2) replacing [PercentTwenty] with a percent sign followed by a 20, with no space in between. I Explorer takes that as a space. I had to type it this way because in the Preview screen of this post I noticed I Explorer (or the Lounge database itself) had already converted it to a space, so the post would show “whatever you want”… anyway, sorry for all the mess.

Now the challenge: anybody knows how to make an hyperlink to that… er… “address” (?), say, in an Outlook e-mail? I can get it right in word, by typing the same “about: ” line in the url: section of the Insert | Hyperlink dialog box. But when I copy and paste from word to outlook, the link is gone. Things like typing “www.about: whatever” won’t work. Nor will “http://about: whatever”.

Any clues? Just can’t be beat by a machine! I know many of you must feel the same.

I’d appreciate your help very much folks!
texttext

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Sorry, but I don’t understand the pupose for this. Why try to create a “hyperlink” to a phrase in order to do nothing but open IE?

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Charlotte,

I know this isn’t really useful. In my case, I just wanted to send an e-mail to a friend o’ mine with a Privacy Statement link in the last line, and I wanted the link to open an IE window showing something like “You Kidding Me?”. Just a joke, and I wanted to know if it could be pulled off… that is, to put this link in an Outlook e-mail.
As I said before… Just can’t be beat by a machine!!! when I find out something works in a certain way, I stick to it until I find it works in a different way… It struck me to see that this “about: ” line thing had a kinda life of its own and wanted to know how it worked.

If anyone knows how to make the link work, I’ll really appreciate it.
TIA

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This might be a remnant of some copied Netscape functionality. In Netscape Navigator 2.x, the first browser I used, you could browse cached pages using about:cache in the address line. There probably were other “about” things, but I can’t recall any off the top of my head. Since there is no practical use for this in IE, as far as I know, I don’t even know why the browser shows a blank page.

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I couldn’t make it work as a clickable link, but you could send the webpage as a link in the email that you send. When the recipient opens the attached link, it’ll open straight to the fake message that you have typed. That’s the closest I could figure out, anyway.

Hope this helps,
Becky

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I’ve figured a way in Outlook 2000, but have to test it in Outlook 97. The trick lies in the format. You have to set the format to HTML, then select the phrase (in my case, Privacy Statement) and then click Insert | Hyperlink. That done, type “about: You[P20]kidding[P20]me?” (without the quotes) in the URL field of the dialog box, and click ok. I left the Type field (http, ftp, etc.) showing http.
I had Outlook configured to send mails with unformatted text. You can, however, type http://www.anything.com in this mails and the address will appear as a blue, cickable underlined link. But so much for the links in mails with unformatted text. HTML formatted mails seem to be able to “save” information beyond what you type (i.e., in this case, you see “Privacy Statement” but the link behind it is completely different), just like Word, Excel, etc. Plain text mails won’t do this.

I’ll test it in Office 97 and let you know the outcome (that was the Office version in my first post)

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ummm… outlook 97 does not support HTML formatting. You can’t create html with ol97 and if it’s sent to OL97, it will be an attachment.

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Yup, you’re right. When I received the HTML mail with the “about: ” line in Outlook 97, the hyperlinked phrase would show in normal typing (no blue, underlined, “hot” font) and be followed by the expression . And the former Ol2000 link is gone in Ol97. Oh well. Guess I’ll get a life now

Thank you all very much

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