alt Hacker News> senior citizens and tried to explain how to parse the domain
Why would you want end users, senior citizens or not, to mentally parse URLs?
The rule is: If the bank, or paypal, or your landlord, or anyone else really emails you that you have to complete some information to your account or pay the latest bill or whatever, you GO TO THEIR WEBSITE and login normally. If it is important they will have the same information there.
The same rule also applied to unsolicited phonecalls, but it might be harder to follow: If your bank, or the police, or some other important person calls you and asks for information or for you to do something that feels the least bit off or hurried, you take their contact information, you look up whatever it is they want you to do and you CALL THEM BACK at the official telephone number of the bank or the police. You probably already have the number and if you don't it's on their web site. Do not call back on any other number.
People working the phone generally have much worse protocols than people working over email, so they may be less prepared for you to do this, but I have never heard of anything important that was emailed that wasn't also easily available when logged in to the website.
The only time it is appropriate to click a link in an email is when you are verifying your email address with them. Not for any other reason.
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Man it's like we live in two different realities and yours is a textbook. dozens of times I've been sent links to download a pdf or fill out a form that is not linked from the main site anywhere. I know because I check - I hate clicking links in emails because of tracking if nothing else
>The rule is: If the bank, or paypal, or your landlord, or anyone else really emails you that you have to complete some information to your account or pay the latest bill or whatever, you GO TO THEIR WEBSITE and login normally.
Yes, that is a "best practice" and good internet hygiene is to never click on email and text message urls but the reason they like clicking on legitimate email urls is convenience and usability. A helpful email link directly lands them on the relevant website page to do whatever they need to do. That's because the email url has a long string query parameters (id, etc) that automatically navigates to the correct webpage.
On the other hand, to do it the "best practice" way, it requires clicking around a confusing website menus and drilling several layers deep to find whatever issue the email is talking about.
A helpful email url link bypasses the hassle of learning whatever flavor-of-the-month confusing UI the website designer happened to to use.
Hang around old people and watch over the shoulder how they use computers and you become sympathetic to how the make it work for them.
E.g. An order status email has a URL link of a UPS tracking number to monitor shipping status. But don't click on that! Instead, copy the 1Z... number to the buffer. Then open a web browser and type in the ups.com url. Then paste the number into the text box. Those copy&paste mechanics not too difficult on desktop (Ctrl+C Ctrl-V) but it is much more difficult on mobile phones (double taps or long press and hold).
That was a simple example. The more complicated one is email from health and medical companies with confusing websites. They'd rather just click on the email url.