How to Avoid Broken Links in Outlook Messages

When you want to include a link in an Outlook message, and that link happens to include a space character as part of the link, there’s a trick in Outlook to allow you to properly encode the link to get it to include the space every time.

Let’s say your link is “\\ServerName\software\my folder\my stuff”, if you just include this exactly as you see it, your link in Outlook will end up looking like this:

\\ServerName\software\my folder\my stuff

Clearly this isn’t right, as the whole value isn’t “linked”.

However, if you put 2 (count ’em two) sets of less than’s and greater than’s around the link, Outlook will correctly encode the whole link.

Do this: (Note: no spaces between the link and the brackets)

<<\\ServerName\software\my folder\my stuff>>

And Outlook will automagically convert it to this:

<\\ServerName\software\my folder\my stuff>

That way you can always get your whole link to appear correctly in an outlook message. If you do this with all links, you’ll never have to worry if they have spaces or not, and your Outlook message will just always work.