Add titles to Substack redirect links in Gmail, exposing the target URL
Newsletters sent via Substack often contain links added by the author. The links in the email go to a redirect service on the Substack site. Click them and you’ll arrive at the intended page, but there’s no way to tell, by mousing over these opaque URLs, where you’ll end up or what site the author linked to.
This script tries to address this, at least when you’re reading newsletters in Gmail on a desktop web browser. It looks for Substack redirect links within a message, tries to determine where each one redirects to, and adds a title tag to the link containing the destination URL, which will appear as a tooltip when you hover the mouse cursor over the link. It does not modify the link URL itself; the intention is not to circumvent Substack’s tracking, but simply to provide some transparency into where the links lead.
This initial version has a few caveats.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome. I’ll put the script on GitHub if there’s any interest.
