Adding a custom hyperlink type (or overriding the existing one for mail messages) seems like your best bet.
Hi org-mode developers,
it would be nice if there was a facility to wash (= shorten) org
link descriptions. From the users perspective this could be a
list of regular expressions with corresponding short forms.
Use case:
I want to automatically shorten org link descriptions,
especially if linking to emails. Some of this emails are from a
request tracker and have extraordinary long From: and Subject:
suffixes which add up to 49 characters in the link description.
I would like to radically shorten this boilerplate.
Even with "normal" To: and Subject:, the default formatting of
such links prefixes the correspondents name with "from " or "to ".
While it's fine with me to distinguish emails from me from
emails to emails to me, I would not need the "from ").
Ciao; Gregor
--
-... --- .-. . -.. ..--.. ...-.-