Recipients getting a warning message when clicking our links

DQCarder

We sent out an email blast today and one of the recipients sent us the following:

———————————————
FYI,
I get a notice from my browser as follows when I click on the link to Draw Mix Paint:
"Warning! It appears that you are about to access a website that has non-standard web address format. Such sites may contain harmful entities such as viruses. We recommend you use extreme caution."
———————————————

And in her forwarded email, the links appeared as follows:

http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/8
http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/9

I understand why you route links that way, but what I don't understand is why they showed up this way in the body of the email she received. Other recipients who have responded showed the normal addresses instead of the sendy addresses. We are sending out more emails tomorrow but need to address this problem first. How often does this happen? Under what circumstances does this happen? Is there anything we can do about it? Even if it means disabling analytics on link-clicking, we are fine with that. We just want to avoid this problem for the remainder of the emails we are sending this week because they're crucial for our business.

Ben

When I access the links you included above, it goes to the intended link.

Other recipients who have responded showed the normal addresses instead of the sendy addresses

What is the 'normal address' you're referring to? And what is your installation URL? The converted links follows the same URL as your installation URL.

DQCarder

Yes, they go to the intended link. That is not the issue. What I mean is this that in the email we sent out, we had two links which were written like so (except with less-than/greater-than symbols instead of brackets obviously):

[a href="http://www.drawmixpaint.com"]http://www.drawmixpaint.com[/a]

and

[a href="http://forum.drawmixpaint.com"]http://forum.drawmixpaint.com[/a]

And in the email they should, and usually do, appear as:

http://www.drawmixpaint.com

and

http://forum.drawmixpaint.com

However, we got a response from a recipient (which I pasted my original post here), in which she included the email as she received it. In the email she received, the links were DISPLAYED as http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/8 and
http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/9, respectively. The rest of the email looked correct, and it was not a plain text version. In addition, when she attempted to click the links, she was given a warning message by her browser (or possibly Yahoo Mail, I'm not sure which).

Our installation URL is http://216.92.6.115/sendy for the reasons explained here: http://sendy.co/discussion/84/domains-hosted-on-amazon-s3-but-need-to-install-sendy-elsewhere

TheThe

I believe this is normal as sendy is attaching your original access address to all URLs. Yours are http://216.92.6.115/sendy so this is why you have links with http://216.92.6.115/sendy in emails.

g.

Ben

@TheThe is right. All converted links follows your installation URL. If your installation URL is http://216.92.6.115/sendy, all links that are converted into trackable links will also use http://216.92.6.115/sendy.

I'm not sure if you realize this, Sendy converts all your links to trackable links. So http://www.drawmixpaint.com/ will become http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/8. When users click on http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/8, users will be redirected to http://www.drawmixpaint.com/ and at the same time records the click in your database.

Also, your URL being displayed as raw HTML may be because you used the WYSIWYG editor to enter HTML in "Rich Text" mode. Or the user's email client was unable to parse the HTML code.

This message:

"Warning! It appears that you are about to access a website that has non-standard web address format. Such sites may contain harmful entities such as viruses. We recommend you use extreme caution."

is generated either by the user's email client or web browser.

I googled this warning message and found this http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ie9-windows_7/warning-it-appears-that-you-are-about-to-access-a/a460ea8e-c7a4-4965-ba74-c9d4f178d9cf?msgId=b1719f91-7c20-46c2-b5ec-83990004ae6c

It looks like the email client or web browser thinks that your link is illegitimate because it is an IP address. A lot of spammers uses IP addresses without a mapped domain name, thus showing a message to warn users that it may link to a harmful site.

I suggest using a domain name instead of an IP address for your installation. Just let me know and I'll have your licensed domain transferred.

DQCarder

Okay, that answers one question, thank you very much!

As for the other, you're still misunderstanding, and this is VERY important. We are already late on our email blast. If you need to call me to discuss my number is 808-443-7539.

When we put links in our email, YES, I know they route through an address in our Sendy installation. But the way the link is DISPLAYED WITHIN THE EMAIL is as the Sendy URL, NOT the one we put in. We have gotten tons of reports about this overnight as more people looked at the emails we sent out. And no, we are not using the WYSIWYG editor.

In other words, in our email, where it should display as:

Hey, here's my new website, check it out: http://www.drawmixpaint.com

it is rewriting that line to

Hey, here's my new website, check it out: http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/8

Is there nothing we can do to just disable the damn analytics thing for link clicks? We really don't care about tracking link clicks. Please respond ASAP. Even if we used a different installation domain we still don't want the email being rewritten like this! It would appear that unless there is an error in the Sendy code, some mail clients replace the display URL with the actual URL (because of course it doesn't realize that the final destination is the same as the display URL so we're not spamming or anything like that).

DQCarder

Is there a section of some PHP file I can just delete or comment out in order to disable the link-tracking stuff? That's really all we want to do to keep it simple.

Ben

First off, if your HTML code is like this:

<a href="http://www.drawmixpaint.com">http://www.drawmixpaint.com </a>

The converted link will be like this:

<a href="http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/8">http://www.drawmixpaint.com </a>

And, the email client will show http://www.drawmixpaint.com.

It will not show http://216.92.6.115/sendy/l/6fb/8.

Unless the email client takes the URL in href and displays it instead. I have never heard of something like that. And Sendy does not display the URL from href and display it in place of the actual URL (http://www.drawmixpaint.com).

Send the email to me (hello at sendy dot co) from your installation so I can see if your links are displayed like that.

Is there nothing we can do to just disable the damn analytics thing for link clicks

There's no way to disable link tracking. Link tracking is common on email marketing platforms to track performance. I never imagined anyone would hate it.

DQCarder

We don't hate it, and we do like Sendy a lot. It's much better than other platforms we've used. I can't explain why some (not most) of our customers are receiving emails like this. When we do the test emails, they appear normal. Most of our responses with forwarded text attached, appear normal. But some of our customers (which, when you're list has 8,000 people, is a lot) get it with the link changed.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe the browser itself, in detecting the "abnormal URL structure" or whatever (since we are routing through an IP) is replacing the text as a means to be transparent to the user. I believe it is just an IE9+ thing, and maybe just IE9+ with security settings turned up thing.

So let me ask you this: is there a way we can write the URLs so that they are not routed, even if that means they are not clickable? For instance, instead of writing a href="xxx" etc, if we just leave the link in text without tags… will that leave the text unaffected?

Thanks in advance for your help. I do tech support myself so I know you guys have a lot of workload considering your customers only pay a one-time fee of $59. For what it's worth, the support I've received from Sendy so far as been fantastic.

Ben

Thanks David.

Disable link tracking
In scheduled.php comment out lines 244, 245 and 248.
In includes/create/send-now.php comment out lines 225, 226 and 229.
In autoresponders.php comment out lines 199, 200, 203, 655, 656, 659, 1116, 1117 and 1120.

Disable open tracking
In scheduled.php comment out line 505
In includes/create/send-now.php comment out line 486
In autoresponders.php comment out line 460, 916 and 1377

Update Oct 12, 2016

You can now switch off 'opens' and 'click' tracking when creating or editing a campaign or autoresponder in version 2.1.2 and above.

DQCarder

Thanks! Seems to be working perfectly.

Ben

You're welcome!