Check before sending whether some of the links in a mail body point to an address other than where the link text says
Categories
(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)
Tracking
(Not tracked)
People
(Reporter: octavio.molano, Unassigned)
Details
Steps to reproduce:
When composing an e-mail containing an address (string starting with http or https, among others) the address automatically becomes a hyperlink, which is useful. But then, if the user realizes the address has something wrong and edit the address, only the text part of the link will be modified, but not the "href" part of the link.
Actual results:
This results on the HTML code ending up like this:
<a href="https://somepage.com">https://anotherpage.com</a>
Since the actual HTML code can't be seen from the Thunderbird mail compose interface, the user doesn't realize that the link points to somewhere else (the user might not even know what HTML is and how it works!), which leads to confusion for the person receiving the mail, since the URL that loads when clicking the link is wrong (and might return an error message), while the text in the link looks right, and most people won't be aware of how HTML hyperlinks work.
Also, some anti-virus software might flag the mail as potential scam because of "deceiving link" since the link points to somewhere else than the text suggests.
Expected results:
To avoid this, Thunderbird should warn that a link in the outgoing mail points to a different address than the one expressed in the link text (in case the link text is not real explanatory text but an address starting with http, https or ftp), and it should offer to fix it (by putting the same address in the href in the link text as well). This would save lots of confusions like that.
I'm using an old version of Thunderbird (68) for now because of some unrelated problems that newer versions have, but my guess is this problem still happens in the latest versions.
I just realized I had already posted an enhancement request like this last year, which demonstrates this happens from time to time:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1764333
This is an easy to implement enhancement, and would prevent lots of confusions because it's too easy to paste a link, then manually modify it from the compose window, but not realize the hyperlink it points to remains unmodified.
Description
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