When reading emails in Hotmail, I dislike the idea of hyperlinks in the message opening up in a framed browser window. One problem is that it eats up browser space and the other being I cannot add it to my favourites or email the URL.

Look at this, a simple hyperlink to www.venkatarangan.com in a Hotmail message, is turned into a URL beast:

http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=09127ba509d5e08eae29a46ded62cadd&lat=1075044828&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2evenkatarangan%2ecom%2f

On an evening where I had nothing else to do, no India Cricket Match, no calls, no reading; I sat down to write this tiny program that solves this problem.

Just right click and copy shortcut on the Hyperlink in Hotmail,  switch to this application, press Decode button. The decoded (Simple) URL is copied into your clipboard. Now you can launch IE and paste the simple URL.

Download v1.0.0.1:

The application is written using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and requires Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 to execute.

If you wish to run this with .NET Framework 1.0, then download this Configuration Zip file and unzip it into the same folder as the main application.

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