Penetrating the Hotmail Disappearing Links Mystery

Editor: I've had complaints from Hotmail.com subscribers that somehow their links don't seem to work. I asked HTML e-mail expert Tom Granger about it, and here's his helpful explanation.

We have researched the Hotmail issue to the best of our ability, and as far as we can tell there seems to be some link accounting and redirecting causing the problems people are experiencing.

Hotmail assigns a redirect to any links contained in an HTML Email message, so that when they are read via Hotmail, it forwards you to the correct URL. However, due to the sheer number of links they have to convert for a large document it takes you a while to finish looking at them. Apparently, these redirect links are temporary. If you open a new message, for example, you will see new and different redirect URLs each and every time you view the message.

If you let your browser with your Hotmail account sit idle for a short while, the links seem to be purged on Hotmail's system, and when you click on them you will receive a 404 error message.

It's no fun for E-mail Marketers.

Editor. Thanks, Tom. The only workaround I see is to send only brief e-mails to Hotmail users, or for Hotmail users to move over to Yahoo! E-mail. If you've learned other aspects of the Hotmail link problem and have found a way to work around this, please let me know.