If you post using IE, then the forum editor inserts an http:// link for anyjthing that looks like a web address, and a mailto: link for anything that looks like an email address.
The mailto: algorithm is badly broken, because it will hyperlink anything of the form "a@b ". It does not even require the expression to be of the form
a@b.c . This creates a situation with numerous false positives, for example see the original post in the thread
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/Vsexpressvc/thread/835bdec4-6589-4a17-9481-fc934dc6e920
The mailto: link here is totally spurious. The worst thing is that if you view a post like this via NNTP (in plain text mode) the post becomes completely garbled, because the mailto: link gets converted to actual text (either by the bridge or in the client
newsreader).
I would be very surprised if with the current algorithm, the number of false mailto: positives does not greatly exceed the number of valid occurrences.
Proposal:
1. Get rid of all automatic mailto: links, unless the mailto: is present in the original text
2. Failing this, improve the algorithm, at the minimum requiring an expression of the form
a@b.c .
A related question: why does the automatic hyperlinking not work if you post with FireFox (even if the text is a complete URL containing http:// or mailto:)?
David Wilkinson | Visual C++ MVP
