Hyperlinks Not Working in Outlook Express

Outlook Express is included with Windows XP, so many people use it for e-mail correspondence or even as a news reader. If you receive e-mails with hyperlinks in Outlook Express, they are shown in blue by default and underlined. Clicking a hyperlink in an e-mail in Outlook Express will open up your default internet browser and show the location the link is pointing to.

You might run into an Outlook Express problem where the hyperlinks in the e-mail messages do not work anymore. If you click the link in the e-mail message nothing happens. This is not an Outlook Express error, but can be a configuration problem related to files types in the Windows Explorer.

To solve this error, try these steps:

1. Open up the Control Panel.
2. Select Add or Remove Programs.
3. Now select the Set Program Access and Defaults in the left-hand side of the window.
4. Next, select Custom and then select Internet Explorer as the default web browser.
5. Click OK.


If this does not help, continue with:

6. Open up the Windows Explorer.
7. In the Tools menu, select Folder Options…
8. In the Folder Options dialog box, select the File Types tab.
9. In the Registered file types list, look up the Extension ‘URL’.

10. In the Details for ‘URL’ extension group, make sure that ‘Opens with:’ is followed by your default browser, e.g. ‘Internet Explorer’. If not, click the Change button and select the internet application in the Open With dialog box.

If this does not fix the problem, continue with:

11. Click the Advanced button.
12. In the Edit File Type dialog box that appears, select the open entry under Actions:
13. Next, check if your settings match the ones in the screenshot below. If not, change them accordingly.

14. Click OK twice and then click Close.

After this, you should now be able to open the hyperlinks from e-mails in Outlook Express again.

If this still does not work, you can try to repeat the steps above but replace the settings with the following screenshot.

Last thing to try is to change the Application used to perform this action to:
C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -nohome
or
C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" %1
These steps all address the issue that the URL association is not configured properly, so if that is the problem, one of these steps will fix it.

A second possible cause for hyperlinks not working in Outlook Express is that a support library is not registered properly. This could be a registry problem, but it can generally be fixed by re-registering the required DLL files.
So use the Run command in the Start menu to execute the following commands:
regsvr32 urlmon.dll
regsvr32 mshtml.dll
regsvr32 shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 browseui.dll
regsvr32 msjava.dll

This will register the listed Dynamic Link Library files again and correct any issues concerning them in the Windows Registry. Try clicking a link in Outlook Express again after this.