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Links not showing in email.

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

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When someone sends me a link, such as website or email address, the link is blank. How can I make the links view able? The problem recently started. I am asking for a friend as they are older and do not know how to screenshot.

When someone sends me a link, such as website or email address, the link is blank. How can I make the links view able? The problem recently started. I am asking for a friend as they are older and do not know how to screenshot.

All Replies (3)

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well without a screenshot, you may have to resort to those thousand words. What does blank mean?

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I can give you some examples that should help clarify the issue.

If the email says: "Hi John Doe, my email is test@somedomain.com. Thank you!"

then I would see: "Hi John Doe, my email is . Thank you!".

Another example that I sent:

I sent "Please see if you can see this link (www.test.com) and let me know"" They seen:

"Please see if you can see this link (              ) and let me know".

I hope that clears things up. I don't use thunderbird myself, but it seems like there has to be some kind of spam/security feature that is hiding the links from view. The links show up fine on other email clients and on the email providers web client. Only thunderbird fails to show the links.

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Sounds like the link font is the same colour as the background and so would appear to be 'blank'. I am assuming that the background colour is white, please tell me if otherwise.

If you hover over the invisible link, it should still show the actual link in the bottom 'Status Bar'.

I would be surprised if this had been changed in Options as it is not something you would generally change.

Do the following to check/change the colour of displayed links: either via 'Menu Bar': 'Tools' > 'Options' > 'Display' > 'Formatting' tab or via 'Mail Toolbar' 'Menu icon' > 'Options' > 'Options' > 'Display' > 'Formatting' tab

click on 'Colours' button A small window opens. On the right side will be 'Link Colours' section. Unvisited Links will probably have a 'white' colour button click on that 'white colour button to open the select colour option. select a mid blue colour.

Visited links are usually in a deeper purple colour. click on OK Click on OK to close Options.

Links should now display in the selected colour.


However....... if the person sending the email included html css coding that overrides the colours of links it displays, then they need to be informed. I have seen this where someone unwittingly changed the colours for links because they included a signature using white link font on a red background and never tested its effects. This even effected fonts, colours etc in the 'Reply'.

Sometimes issues can be caused by people using MS Word to compose emails or signatures html files instead of doing it in Thunderbird. This should not be done as MS Word is a specialised word processing tool - not a simple html tool and it bloats emails with useless code causing all kinds of issues.

Does the email have a signature ? If you would like me to check the email, please attach it to an email and send to : mail at anje dot co dot uk I do not generally respond via that email address, but in your case, it would allow me to check the html code to see what is going on.