The plain text emails our company sends to clients who wish to receive them include a long string of parameters which are necessary for the business side. These are long strings including weird special characters and pipes and an email address.
The links, which are necessary for analytics and attributing sales, are therefore not fully clickable on iOS and Android, and so the parameters are not being properly logged... which potentially screws up a lot of things from analytics to attributing sales referrals.
On android devices these links fail by making the email address clickable.
On iOS devices some of the link is properly made into a clickable link., however the first part of the link is cut off at a certain number of characters, or perhaps because the string includes something that would cause it to believe it is no longer reading a hyperlink.
So:
A) Is there a character limit being applied to plaintext links in OSX, or a string combination that would cause the email to escape the text hyperlink?
B) Is there a simple way to include the email information. Some sort of escape char perhaps?
(HTML emails are the majority of what we do and we don't put a lot of effort into plaintext, because we think it drives very little sales. That is probably right... but when we're not actually tracking them it is not a scientifically sound assumption. And no doubt even a bit of bad data complicates the data analysts' jobs).
I would be interested if anybody can reference demographics on site visits from plaintext messages also... my personal guess is that if people are electing to receive emails in any kind, they are probably buying stuff. Who cares enough about data use to get plaintext emails only, but... opts into ones they don't want? In particular, because only one of the links properly tracks these users, I am guessing that their engagement is high to not be culled from the mailing lists altogether.
Since you have a logic in place, which is building your URL, you should check if your URL is correctly formed.
How to validate URL: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1471201/how-to-validate-an-url-on-the-iphone
Once you confirm it's a valid URL, try shorten your URL using TinyUrl's API:
http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=<#YOUR_URL#>