Can someone explain the iOS "x-apple-msg-load://"?

Question

I'm sending emails from a Rails application. The emails contain links like the following:

http://critically.in/events/14-san-francisco-ca-mc-hammer-bay-to-breakers

The URL is correct when I open it on my computer, but when I read it in Mail on my iPad or iPhone, the link is converted to:

x-apple-msg-load://90CEFE95-A78E-427F-B68E-EF184F497B69/critically.in/events/14-san-francisco-ca-mc-hammer-bay-to-breakers

Answer 1

Make sure your links are actually fully qualified. That is, make sure they are containing the scheme and the entire domain-path.

• bad: ../blah/foo/bar
• good: http://example.com/blah/foo/bar

Relative URLs are not properly resolved by the iOS mail client and result into things looking like the issue you are describing.

To be absolutely certain, make sure you check the raw message text and not the results you see within other mail-clients.