When I forward an email any hyperlinks are disabled

JayB1008 wrote:

Barney-15E, that is the issue. Apple Mail is changing the HTML to text in the forwarding. Not sure if it can retain the HTML in a forward. That is my real question.

You are not understanding what I am telling you.

Email is a text-only protocol. Everything is sent as a stream of text. Images are encoded into ascii text in order to send them as attachments. HTML is already text.

The body of the email is then interpreted by the receiving email client. That email client will look at the text and decide what it needs to do to present the text stream it received. If it knows there is a stream of text that should be decoded into an image, it does so. Same with HTML. If it recognizes the HTML, it may render the HTML as a hyperlink or it may not. You cannot control what it will do.

When you reply or forward a message, the links are not active because Mail doesn't render them. However, the message is sent with the HTML exactly as it was in the original.

Raw Text of the message composed with "Add Link":

https://www.apple.com <https://www.apple.com/>

Raw Text of Forwarded message as received by Mail (I stripped out the headers):

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> https://www.apple.com <https://www.apple.com/>
> 
>

Mail isn't changing anything.

JayB1008 wrote:

When I forward an email any hyperlinks are disabled

If I receive an email with active hyperlinks, they are disabled if I forward the email. How do I keep them active?

Include the complete path

ex. < https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253354435> whether it is hot or not the recipient can copy&paste if they have an interest.

Not something hidden.

When you receive them, Mail renders the HTML. HTML tags are merely a text string, nothing more. The email client has to render that raw text as HTML. If the recipient’s email client chooses not to render the text as HTML, there isn’t anything you can do about it.

I haven’t tried, but Mail might not even render the HTML in a forwarded email even though it does in the original.

It really depends on the recipient's email client.

Unless the client renders the link as html, it's jus text like everything else in email (including attachments).

If you send me an email your hyperlinks will never be "active" regardless what you do at your end.

FWIW, you can verify what has been explained by forwarding an email with links to yourself.