Links in HotMail emails: why aren't they active?

Near the top of the message containing the disabled links, you'll probably see a message like this:

Hyperlinks are considered "internet content".

What might not be obvious is that the two statements at the end are click-able:

Enable all message content (once) - click this and the links will be enabled within this message until you close it. So if it's a newsletter you're trying to unsubscribe from (hopefully not mine!), you'd click this, then go click on the unsubscribe link.

Never disable content from this sender - click this and links (and images) from email sent by this sender only will always be enabled. If you subscribe to a newsletter, this is how you might enable its content for this, and subsequent issues.

Now, you can, if you like, turn this feature off completely, but naturally I don't recommend it. Among other things, "internet content" includes images - meaning that items called "bugs" can be included in HTML formatted email that are fetched when you open the email. This can tell the sender that you did, in fact, open the email. In the case of spammers, it tells them that their email has reached a real person and is worth sending even more spam to.

To turn it off, click on the Options link in the upper right of your HotMail screen:

Then click on Mail in the menu on the left:

Click on Mail Display Settings:

The, finally, select the setting you want for Display Internet Content:

Note that for email HotMail considered junk, you'll need to explicitly mark it as "not junk" before links are activated.

With that in mind, there's one more technique that's safer than activating anything, or marking anything you're not totally sure of as "not junk".

For many links, "copy / paste" works well.

Here's a bit of a message displayed in HotMail with the link disabled:

Now, by clicking, holding the mouse button down, and dragging across the URL in that message to select it, I can then right click on the selected link and click on Copy:

Having copied that link to the clipboard, you can now go up to the address bar in Internet Explorer and paste it in:

Resulting in:

In general this copy/paste technique is the safest of all, because it also bypasses any attempts to disguise URLs - links that look like on thing but take you to something else entirely - which is extremely common in phishing scams.