[LINK] E-mail question

[Ivan Trundle]

On 12/06/2007, at 3:16 PM, Pilcher, Fred wrote:

> My 2c (and worth every penny):
>
> Clearly it's a dog's breakfast out there in e-mail client land, and  
> that's none of our doing. If there's a no-hassle way that we can  
> give people reliable links, I think we should do so.
>
> Perhaps you could provide the original *and* the tinyurl?

Thanks, Fred, but no...

It crosses the line of professionalism and confidentiality, from our  
business perspective. And is labour-intensive, to boot.

Whilst I concur that as a service to clients that URLs should be  
reliable, using TinyURL as part of a web-based business is the  
equivalent of selling a Rolls Royce and using Trabant parts. Our  
clients wouldn't wear it, and it would harm our business to permit  
another website to store this kind of information, for either short  
or long-term purposes.

But I can do the TinyURL thing manually, anyway: by a small script on  
my own site to redirect to the longer URL. It's messy, and would take  
a lot of effort, since we send out hundreds of unique URLs per week.

Confidentiality and privacy are issues that we simply don't want to  
farm out to third parties (the URLs in question are unique  
identifiers for a particular purpose: mostly survey work).

Warmly

iT