Email Message Links?

1

I use direct links to emails often. They start with message: and seem to contain the message id. They probably could be generated by code but I get them from forwarding an email to Things or using the Things helper. In Things and Bear, the link opens the email. In Drafts, in link mode, it creates a new email message.
Is there a way to get them to work? Or another workaround?

2

Are you trying this with link mode enabled?

If Iā€™m in Drafts on my Mac, and in link mode, it opens the linked e-mail in my default mail client (MailMate), and if Iā€™m on i*OS, it opens the linked mail in Appleā€™s Mail app.

3

Yes, Iā€™m in links mode. In Things, the entire link is clickable. In Drafts, only the middle of the link is clickable.
To be more clear, message:%3 at the beginning of the link and %3E at the end is not clickable. The middle that seems to be message-id@domain.com is clickable and fills as the To-address in a new email.
I am copying the link from Things. It generates the same link whether I copy with Ctrl-C or right-click ā€˜Copy as linkā€™ Iā€™ve seen similar behavior in Agenda. Email links work in Agenda if I use the second method.
The links are not working on IOS or Mac.
Can you tell me if the format of your links is similar to what I described above? Mine look like message:%3message-id@domain.com%3E

Thanks!

4

My links look only partially like that.

Hereā€™s an example:

message://%3c0100016eed44c62c-62eb4457-b1e9-4718-bc20-c5194d305cec-000000@email.amazonses.com%3e

I would expect the forward slashes and %3c (decodes to ā€œ<ā€) and %3e (decodes to ā€œ>ā€) to be in place to make a URL. Certainly ā€œ%3ā€ wouldnā€™t be a valid URL encoding.

5

Youā€™re right! If I change them from the encoding back to the < and >, it works. Somehow Things works with the link as-is. Thanks for your help.

6

As it stands, link mode uses Appleā€™s link detector, provided as part of their data detector APIs, and it does not properly recognize message: URLs. Annoying.

It is something Iā€™ve had on my list to fix, but requires writing my own link parser and I havenā€™t gotten around to it. Iā€™ll try to bump it up on my list.

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