How do I stop Gmail from stripping the values out of URLs?

Question

I recently learned that webmail clients like Gmail will do alterations on HTML emails, for example adding target="_blank" to <a> tags.

I've also discovered that other alterations happen as well. When I send an HTML email to Gmail (and possibly other web mail clients) from my PHP script, variable values included in the URL of any links are being stripped out. So, for example, this is the value I'm setting in my PHP code:

$mailContent = '<p><a target="_blank" href="https://example.com/confirmation.html?verification=x1x1x1x1x1x1x1x&email=yyyy@email.com">click here to go to the web site and activate your account!</a></p>';

But when the email is received in Gmail, the HTML code comes out like this:

<p><a target="_blank" href="https://example.com/confirmation.html?verification=&email=">click here to go to the web site and activate your account!</a></p>

The values x1x1x1x1x1x1x1x and yyyy@email.com have been stripped out from within the <a> tag.

How do I protect the values of the variables that I want to pass to the URL so that Gmail won't remove them?

can you please edit your post and include php code, to show how you access gmail? thx — Alex Shesterov, Mar 27 '13 at 18:52
@alex-shesterov: I don't access Gmail from PHP. Gmail is acting on the email it receives. — Questioner, Mar 27 '13 at 18:53
@Dave M G: have you tried sending to other mail servers to see if *gmail* is the actual problem? — Alex Shesterov, Mar 27 '13 at 18:56
Same here. Sad that not solution after ten years for this utter crap. — inf3rno, Jul 13 '23 at 15:06

PetaspeedBeaver · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-28T07:27:41.577

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Click View original/source on the message in Gmail to see if the URLs looks like they should then. If so you know that the problem is how Gmail is formatting the message for your viewing. If it's mutilated even in the source I was wondering if there's anything in your webpage/php/CMS (do you use one) that changes the code.

You should try URL-encoding as @Crisp said. Here's the W3 reference.

edited Mar 28 '13 at 07:27

answered Mar 27 '13 at 19:00

PetaspeedBeaver

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 28 '17 at 00:24

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Emailing in html uses Quoted-printable Encoding. The problem with your $mailContent is that the "=" must be represented by =3D

Try adding this: $mailContent = quoted_printable_encode($mailContent);

answered Jun 28 '17 at 00:24

CoolPal.Manila

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NappingRabbit · Answer 3 · 2013-03-28T10:50:43.263

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This may not be the perfect answer, but if your application allows for it, I have used URL shorteners a number of times.

http://goo.gl/ is my preferred because the API is super easy to implement and google is very fast. I have a function in a class and I just run my url through it and send the return wherever I need it to be.

edited Mar 28 '13 at 10:50

answered Mar 27 '13 at 18:43

NappingRabbit

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+1 for a non-standard and non-perfect but always-working solution ) – Alex Shesterov Mar 27 '13 at 18:54
note that some spam filters mark emails using url shorteners as spam. I don't know if Google will mark their own url shortener as spam though – Michael Apr 02 '17 at 09:14

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 08 '20 at 02:12

Another non-perfect answer here but, my problem was that I was including an http url in the html body and apparently is not valid so I changed them to https. This was on a dev environment so no problem on production.

Here is more info about this:

Any URL's in the body of the mail which lead to insecure sites may also need to be removed. Use https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search to validate these links.. All links should be correctly prefixed with "https". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS Google seem to be rejecting "http". Sometimes, but not always, removing links from any signature can help.

How do I stop Gmail from stripping the values out of URLs?

4 Answers4

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