I agree entirely with John and I see no reason why one cannot use shortened URLs. The Glamorgan Mailing List's website is at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~glamorgan/ I often use TinyURL - I just tried it out with this long address and here is the result. ========================== TinyURL was created! The following URL: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~glamorgan/ has a length of 60 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 26 characters: http://tinyurl.com/7gm4ne4 [Open in new window] Or, give your recipients confidence with a preview TinyURL: http://preview.tinyurl.com/7gm4ne4 [Open in new window] ========================================== I do like the preview for those who are cautious. My best wishes, Jill Glamorgan Mailing List's website http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~glamorgan/ -----Original Message----- From: powys-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:powys-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of John Ball Sent: 13 July 2012 18:58 To: powys@rootsweb.com Subject: [POWYS] Shortened URLs (formerly "online parish registers") Dear Listers, While it's always wise to be cautious about clicking on unfamiliar links, there are sometimes justifiable reasons why a long URL has been shortened before including it in an e-mail. For example, an e-mail program's word-wrapping feature may cause a long URL to be split onto two lines, especially if the URL contains a hyphen [-]. In such cases, only the first line of the URL may appear as a hot link. Clicking on a partial link like this usually results in a 'Page not found' type of error. Shortening the URL eliminates this problem. As has been mentioned, there are several companies offering URL shortening services. The one I prefer is TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com/) which has been around for many years. All the shortened URLs generated by TinyURL include "http://tinyurl.com/" in the URL. For example: http://search.ancestry.co.uk/group/ukicen/UK_Census_Collection.aspx is shortened to http://tinyurl.com/cg7wtgh As has been mentioned, real spam messages almost always contain either no supporting text, or text that is badly expressed and/or poorly spelt, or text which is irrelevant to genealogy. Kind regards, John