Hidden html - what does it do?

[Kent McPherson]

Can someone tell me what happens when I open an email in Outlook and it has
some hidden tags in it with website addresses? Here's an example:

Click here for fr<A href="http://blah blah blah></A>ee consultation.

Now the only thing that shows up on the screen is "Click here for a free
consultation." But what does this hidden tag do?

 

[Vanguard]

Can someone tell me what happens when I open an email in Outlook and it
has
some hidden tags in it with website addresses? Here's an example:

Click here for fr<A href="http://blah blah blah></A>ee
consultation.

Now the only thing that shows up on the screen is "Click here for a free
consultation." But what does this hidden tag do?

It's the link to the actual web site. Text is just text. It doesn't
provide the link. Some e-mail clients will attempt to identify text strings
as URLs, like http://www.theirdomain.com but that is just an interpreted
text string, not an actual link as in HTML which uses the <A> tag to
identify a link. That's why it is up to the user to look at the source of
an HTML-formatted e-mail to see to where a link actually goes since the text
string is independent of the link. The sender could even try to lie to the
recipient by using <a
href="http://www.spamdomain.com">http://www.microsoft.com</a> hoping the
user sees http://www.microsoft.com and never looks inside the HTML code to
see that the actual link goes somewhere else.

If you want to allow HTML-formatted e-mails to get rendered and present the
content as the sender wants you to see it then do so at your own risk. It
is your responsibility to know what the HTML-formatted message actually
contains. If you don't want to render HTML-formatted e-mail then don't
(i.e., configure to read in plain-text only mode).

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

It does nothing, because it's such a malformed tag -- with no text between
the <a> and </a> tags to provide something for the user to click on.

 

[Brian Tillman]

It's the link to the actual web site. Text is just text. It doesn't
provide the link.

That's not the point. Kent described a hidden link. There is no text
associated with the link. There's no "width" to the link so that it appears
to be unclickable. Kent's question is why embed a link that can't be
clicked? What purpose does it serve?

If it's something other than a URL to an HTML file, it might be a "bug": a
link that reports back to the mesage sender that the page was viewed, thus
validating the email address of the recipient. Other than that, I can't
imagine a purpose either.