I am a bit tired of getting unreadable emails full of inline links...

Take the following example:

Hi Myself,

I just wanted you to know that I ( http://aldobucchi.com/ ) wrote a piece on writing emails with links ( http://blog.aldobucchi.com/2008/09/writing-tidy-emails-with-using.html ). I hope it provides you with ideas on how to keep your emails short and clean.

You'll notice the links get in the way and bloat the message, making it hard to read. The longer the message, the worst the situation.

There are two ways to solve this:

Use Inline Shortened URLs

Hi Myself,

I just wanted you to know that I[http://bit.ly/221Jq3] wrote a piece on writing emails with links[http://bit.ly/4EYyRg]. I hope it provides you with ideas on how to keep your emails short and clean.

Best,
Me

You can argue that these short URLs still get in the way. Yeah, but they are short! And, what's just as important, they don't contain words with any meaning. This means they don't confuse you while reading the message in a linear fashion.

Try to read "I ( http://www.example.com/sites/people/guywithabike.html ) love you".

Use Footnotes

Hi Myself,

I just wanted you to know that I[1] wrote a piece on writing emails with links[2]. I hope it provides you with ideas on how to keep your emails short and clean.

Best,
Me

[1] http://aldobucchi.com/
[2] http://blog.aldobucchi.com/2008/09/writing-tidy-emails-with-using.html

Tip:

If you're writing a long email with five or more links, chances are you will be moving paragraphs around for a while and it will be hard to keep track of the actual order of the footnotes.
What I do to solve this is to leave the links in their actual inline positions till the final revision of the email ( right before sending it ), and only then refactor them down to the footnotes, one by one ( copy paste, and take note on the next number ).

Conclusion

Not much to say. I confess I just wrote this post so I can politely point people who write me bloated emails this way ;)

If you don't know which one to use: I normally use the latter in academia ( I think it is a habit inherited from paper footnotes ) and the former when talking to business clients ( who find footnotes irritating ).

Ah, and if you're thinking: "this is the reader's problem", you're absolutely wrong.
In today's information overloaded era, hard to read messages will be most probably scanned, poorly assimilated and discarded. You are the one writing the email in the first place... YOU are the one who wants to get the message across.