Forwarding an Email Sent From Marketo Breaks Links

[ttrahern1]

We send emails to our contacts in Marketo with links to webpages and PDFs. When the recipient forwards this email to the rest of their office, the links no longer work and instead pull up blank webpages. 

Does anyone have a solution for this issue?

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's not uncommon for your markup to break upon forwarding — you can't expect an email that's appended to another block of text to look as it did originally — but links (hrefs) within the email should remain intact.

You'll have to provide a clear example of an inbound email (attach an entire .EML file) whose links break upon standard forwarding.

[ttrahern1]

https://nexpointcap-my.sharepoint.com/:u:/g/personal/ttrahern_nexpoint_com/EX-X7WRs1ShKliFS8meTRe4BS... 

Here is a link to download the .msg file. Will that work as an example?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

That example is useful, but not for the reason you might think!

Because it's a proprietary Outlook binary MSG file, it reveals that the problem occurs when Outlook in particular mangles the SafeLink URL (https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/...).  That URL is a wrapper around the Marketo tracked link, added specifically because you use Outlook security. And Outlook doesn't know how how keep that link looking right when the message is forwarded.

However, the problem doesn't exist with a standard mail client.  If I forward the same message from Thunderbird or The Bat!, for example, the links work fine. It's an Outlook bug, in other words.

Something else you should realize, though, is that the logo link doesn't work in the original email. Even before you forward it, it goes to an empty page b/c it wasn't linked correctly in Marketo (missing {{my.token}} or ${variable} I assume).

[ttrahern1]

Thank you! This is very helpful.