Outlook Tips

Learning Microsoft Outlook One Tip At A Time

Outlook 2013 Absolute Beginner's Guide Diane Poremsky [Outlook MVP]

Tip 293: Hyperlinks Not Working?

Are you having problems using hyperlinks in your email? Try resetting Internet Explorer – from either IE's tools, options menu or Control panel, Internet settings, go to the Programs tab and click the button to reset web settings.

If you are trying to use Firefox and hyperlinks cause Windows Explorer to open, see Use FireFox as the Default Browser to Open Links.

See This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions for other options if resetting the web settings don’t work.

Published September 8, 2005. Last reviewed on September 10, 2011.

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6 Comments on "Tip 293: Hyperlinks Not Working?"

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bobz18188@gmail.com

Links in my Outlook 2007 mostly work fine. But in some e-mails, they take me to only http://http and that is all; of course this does not work. I can hover over the link and see it, but click or copy does not work. The link is too long a string to copy visually. If I open the same e-mail using Gmail on the web without Outlook, the link works fine. IE11 is my only installed browser. What is going on?

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December 10, 2015 12:10 pm
Diane Poremsky

it sounds like the link is malformed and outlook gets confused. Are these HTML messages? Right click on the bottom of the message and choose view source. Find the link in the source code - it will be in an href command: href="url is here". post the href and first 20 characters or so here and I'll take a look at it.

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December 10, 2015 1:19 pm
JR
I had the exact same issue after mistakenly installing Chrome attached to an Adobe update. (sneaky stuff) I unistalled Chrome when I realized what happened, and as others said I wasn't able to open hyperlinks in Outlook. I'm a Firefox and tried setting Firefox as my default browser through the control panel. I was still getting the same error message. So I opened Firefox went in to options> options> advanced > system defaults. And even though I set Firefox as my default browser in the control panel it was not showing this way in Firefox settings. So I selected "Set… Read more »
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September 17, 2012 11:28 am
outlooktips

See http://www.slipstick.com/problems/link_restrict.htm for other things to try. Most people tell me that "Edit Registry part 2" was the fix they used.

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May 31, 2011 12:14 pm
David Anderson
I have been using Firefox as my browser for sometime now, and Outlook 2007 for my email. I lately installed the latest Google Earth, and I didn't realize that it had installed Google Crome and set it as my default browser. I did not want that, so I reset my default browser back to Firefox and uninstalled Google Crome. But after I did that hyperlinks in my email messages stopped working. I get a popup message saying "This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. ..." I tried reseting my browser to Internet Explorer, and… Read more »
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May 31, 2011 11:36 am
Joseph Romano

I reinstalled Google Chrome after uninstalling it. Set Google Chrome as the default search engine when it asks.

Then go to internet explorer, tools > Programs and click the top box, make default so internet explore is the default search engine.

close and restart outlook. problem fixed. remove chrome via the control panel.

I figured this our from reading all the posts of others. Joe

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October 9, 2011 6:05 am