I’ve recently had trouble reading and using URLs sent to me from people outside of OCPS. They appear to be encrypted by a data security product called Proofpoint. So I developed a couple of tests that leads me to the following conclusions:
– Whenever anyone outside of OCPS sends an email to someone inside of OCPS using Plain Text e-mail, ProofPoint encodes any URLS in the message.
– I’m still trying to track down some other issues, like why not all URLs are encoded. However, it appears from multiple tests that URLs pointing within OCPS are not encoded when email comes into OCPS. Notice that all URLs that point within OCPS are NOT encoded but all others are. I’m not 100% sure that is the rule yet, but I’m getting there.
Email sent from my personal account to work using plain-text:
Same email sent from my personal account to work using HTML:
So then I tried send email from inside OCPS to an outside account. When I used HTML or RICH-TEXT, the URLs received on the outside account looked normal:
However, when I tried sending the same email to the outside account using PLAIN-TEXT, the URLs were again encrypted:
So it appears that a good rule to follow might be to use HTML or RICH-TEXT for all emails being sent from OCPS or received through OCPS from outside accounts so that the URLs are readable.