In the past couple of weeks I noticed in some of the emails I received, some URLs were clickable and others were not. I didn’t spend enough trying to figure it out but it perplexed me, especially on the emails I sent out that had links to register for programs or product specials.

Thanks to a post on Alex Mandossian’s Productivity Strategies Facebook page, I learned this is a bug, or maybe it’s deliberate, that cropped up in February. Alex directed his readers to Frank Bauer’s blog with a video explaining the problem and what to do about it.

Essentially, any URL that has a capital letter after the http:// is not an active, clickable link in Gmail. I sent myself an email to test it out:

You can see that the top URL is not active whereas the others are. The other variations are all active. So either use a lowercase letter or www right after the http://

I usually omit the www and I almost always capitalize words since the URLs read better and are better for branding purposes. I’ll probably add the www. now so I can keep on capitalizing.

What does this mean? Take a look at the autoresponders you have set up. Until this is resolved by Google, you better make sure all your promotional links are clickable which means reviewing all your email messages. What a pain! Seems like a good task for a VA.

I have dozens of autoresponders each with multiple messages. But if those links are promoting programs or services or resources, then they sure better be clickable because most people will not take the time to copy and paste a link in to their browser address bar and you could be leaving money on the table.

Original post by Denise Wakeman, The Blog Squad and software by Elliott Back