Greetings, all-

I have received a message from ICANN staff regarding the lifespan of access to masked hyperlinks. I have copied and pasted their response verbatim:

hi - i heard back from the security team - Great question!There is a long answer and a short answer.In short, the links will always work as long as Proofpoint is still a company J.The long answer is once the URL is re-written it will always be re-written. For example, if you forward an email to another company that does not own proofpoint but that email you sent has a proofpoint re-written link, they can still open it. It will always re-direct to the proofpoint servers and then to the final destination. If for some reason you leave proofpoint, those links will still work just so long as Proofpoint is still a company.Hope this answers your question!


Best wishes,



Ayden Férdeline
[linkedin.com/in/ferdeline](http://www.linkedin.com/in/ferdeline)



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: External links & archives
Local Time: 2 February 2017 12:43 PM
UTC Time: 2 February 2017 12:43
From: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>

I really dislike this masking of hyperlinks when we receive an email from ICANN staff now. When I read email archives, I can't see the real URL to ascertain at a glance what I am really clicking on, and must trust it will take me to the ICANN website. I rarely click on every hyperlink in an email, as I can see from the URL whether it is an announcement, a PDF, taking me to the wiki, or somewhere else. Now I am often left to click all the links to try to find the relevant material. This is a but a small inconvenience, and not my biggest concern. What I worry about is how we archive these links. In five or ten years time, will "urldefense.proofpoint.com" plus the string of 200 or so random characters still redirect to the linked content? We don't need these third party redirects, it does not make us any safer, and it feels very much us vs. them. Is it possible that we can get some meaningful assurances from ICANN staff that these masked links will redirect to the correct URLs in perpetuity? Thanks



Ayden Férdeline
[linkedin.com/in/ferdeline](http://www.linkedin.com/in/ferdeline)