"As was already the case, I _WILL NOT_ click on links whose final destination I do not know"

As an aside, it seems that it would be a good thing (tm) if web browsers (or web services) were able to identify the final URL that such links would go to, without you having to click on them and go through the whole redirect process....

Short URL?

make it longer...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549

as I'm sure someone else will point this out too - FF FTW.

I for one am very happy to block these pointless URL shrinking sites from any email content.

Infact it sounds like the time to find a Milter that can reject emails that contain a URL such as these pointless URLs when in an Email.

Don't really see the problem here.

If you are clicking on a link on spam, then what does it matter if it goes through a redirection or not. You are still clicking on a link in spam and will suffer the consequences, whether its directly or redirected. Don't click on spam's links. Simple.

If you are clicking on a link in a phishing attempt, then you are clearly not reading the url. If it doesn't say "Yourbank.com", then you have no right to expect a redirect to take you there. What reputable business is going to use a redirection service just to get a short URL? Their URL is a vital part of their identity, Besides that, you're not paying attention to what everyone has been saying about phishing links in emails for years now. Don't click on links on emails that claim to come from your bank. Simple.

Paris, obviously.

At least not without having preview enabled to show the link you are about to follow. TinyURL offers this feature whilst other redirectors do not.

A certain notorious imageboard uses the redirector trick to punt users to nefarious sites all the time (Malware and Trojans, porn spam etc). After being caught out myself on the odd occasion I no longer click such links without a preview feature.

People used this a lot on a forum I used to be a moderator on. 'twas very annoying, as tinyurl don't even allow you to see what link you're clicking through to - which I found extremely annoying, as I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to go to there site and paste their url into a box, and have it spit out the real identity of the link.

We had all sorts of stuff posted and I really didn't need (or want) to have to see 2 girls one cup yet AGAIN, in order to ban the user in question, just the url will do thankyou...

Thumbs down because that really used to annoy me.

on Tweetdeck you can set it so, when you click a URL you can see where its going to take you before the page even loads. Infact before it even loads a browser window!

This is very very helpful in separating the spam and the legit!

so if you are tweeting, get tweetdeck.

Don't click on links in email, simple as that! No reason to click on links in emails. End of story!

If it's something that interests me, then I will fire up the browser and manually type it in and do a search on the site in question. Yes, that might take longer, but then I weigh that against the time it will take to recover all my data and I think an extra 30 secs to check something out is preferable to several hours putting my machine back together.

Thanks for the Tweetdeck tip.