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by excalibur 1457 days ago
It is in fact possible to extract a destination URL from a Safelink one without clicking it. For the full link this can be tedious, but identifying the domain can still be done quickly.
1 comments

For normal URLs, I agree. But in this case you have adversarial urls. Suppose the scammer puts some http and www.google.com in the url parameters, after some randomly generated 8 characters dot someobscuretld site.

I don't trust myself enough to be 100% sure I can decode an URLencoded misleading mess perfectly all the time.

They already hid urls in the username of the url, like www.google.com.unholymessherethatscrollsoutoftheurlbar @ malignantdomainnotgoogle.blah