Hyperlinks in composed (g)mail

Long back, when I had just started using Internet, i.e. 4yrs back, I did not know its A-B-C-D. Was worse than a six grader who knew how to e-mail & chat. In these initial stages, for the access provided we could not create any mail id. Thanks to my friends, they gave me one from their many existing ids, Yahoo! being my first. Thats how my journey into this world of internet began.

I got the usual stuff of forwards. I used to get excited and also shocked at the kind of stuff that was coming in e-mails, high quality yet so easily. There it began the stream of forwarding mails to all my friends. One thing I never liked was the history of the mail sent across while forwarding, clearly tracing to its remotest possible source, which was never deleted by the one who was forwarding. It adds to nuisance and takes time to reach the actual content and purpose of the mail. I never wanted that feeling to appear among people whom I was sending these mails. Thus Ctrl+H was deleted. At the same time, I never wanted any of my friends to know from where these mails were coming to me. If they come to know of it, then I become redundant, right? :) So, deleting history added an extra share towards this cause.

Yet there was one more thing that could let others know about the root of a mail, hyperlinks on the images. But, there was nothing one could do to get rid of it. We could not see the html* part of a mail to remove href on a image. We lived through it. Then came the upgradation of gmail to newer version from the older version. In that version, when we clicked on an image or text having an hyperlink, one could

• Go to that link
• Change that link
• Remove that link

Finally, there was someone who felt the same need as me. But apart from this, there was one more addition in this newer version. If it was an image, it provided options to resize the image to Small, Medium, Large, leave Original or Remove it. When clicked on image with hyperlink, this image bar alone appeared instead of hyperlink bar. But to the comfort to some piece of mind, there was another way around to achieve removal of hyperlink from images, inspite of non appearance of hyperlink bar; 'Link' image in the RTF. One could remove hyperlink by clicking on it, since if there was an hyperlink, it would be in active stage and re-clicking it, removed any hyperlink attached. That eased the process of cleaning up hyperlinks as well, thus subsequent forwards from me, leaved out all the trace of its origin*.

But from last few days, this feature is not working. Clicking on hyperlink image, is bringing up a box to add a link, even to an already hyperlinked image. Disappointment. In last few days, this is the second bug in Gmail [FIRST POSTED HERE]. Gmail, what has happened to you!!!

* Show Original option in gmail gives us the html part of the mail. GMail does not show the client-ip, though in some mails I did find there existed a client-ip from where a particular mail was sent but those ips could not be linked to any location. Yahoo! and Rediff give this information, in their headers which when entered into some sites like this, searches for a client-ip mentioned in its header and traces it to the possible location .