Email formatting basics (links in plain text emails)

If you send your email in plain text, then your URL will be plain text. It's plain text, you can't dress it up.

If you send it as HTML, just use a simple anchor tag and use the URL as both the href and the text. That way if a mail client removes the link at least the user will still be able to copy/paste the url.

There is a syntax similar to angle-addr as defined in RFC2822 and mailto URL Schema defined in RFC2368.

RFC2396 mentions using angle brackets as delimiters around URI in text documents and protocol fields:

The angle-bracket "<" and ">" and double-quote (") characters are excluded because they are often used as the delimiters around URI in text documents and protocol fields. The character "#" is excluded because it is used to delimit a URI from a fragment identifier in URI references (Section 4). The percent character "%" is excluded because it is used for the encoding of escaped characters.

delims = "<" | ">" | "#" | "%" | <">

Example derived from real-world usage:

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Content-Type: text/plain

Some introduction text

The text I want to display in this link<https://some.target.dom/ain#place?i=want&to=go>

The rest of my plain text message

Another option rather than simply including urls inline in your text is to use a markdown-ish syntax that allows you to separate the two. For example, using citation-style link references (a la the way SO does it in this editor) could be done like so:

Hello, this is a plain email that links to a [cool page][1].

Sincerely,
Joe

[1]: http://foo.com/cool_page

I've seen it done this way and it works well, especially if you have a lot of links.