This is a helpful note to everyone, not just those unfortunates who
are saddled with incompetent news clients like Upchuck or AOHell.

When you run a search on groups.google.com, you may often use
specific search criteria such as group, date range, key word or
phrase, and/or author. When you find an article as the result of
such a search, all of the search criteria are included in the
article's URL. Here's an example:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=SM...st.com&rnum=10

Certain news clients cannot format a URL that long properly, and as
a result they are displayed in an uncopiable form such as this:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=SM...+author:arnyk%
40hotpop.com&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&as_drrb=b&as_mind=12&as_minm=5&as_miny=200
2&as_maxd=4&as_maxm=9&as_maxy=2003&selm=LcucnSfVse zN7K6iXTWJiA%40comcast.c
om&rnum=10

There is no way to simply click on this mess and see the desired
page in your browser.

Instead of victimizing the rest of the group by inserting an
unusable URL in your post, follow this simple procedure to display a
short, easily utilized URL. All you need is the domain of the page
and the message ID block. The domain is the easily recognized URL of
the Google search engine:

http://groups.google.com/groups?

After that, snip out everything up to the message ID block. The
message ID block contains the Google script notation, the message ID
number, and the message ID domain. From the sample above:

Google script notation selm=
message ID number LcucnSfVsezN7K6iXTWJiA%40
message ID domain comcast.com

You want everything from selm= through the domain. Snip everything
after the domain. The shortened URL is thus:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...%40comcast.com


You can also change the %40 to @ if you want to be elegant.



Note: This method is so straightforward, simple, and reliable that
Arnii Krooger will refuse to adopt it.