My research firm wants to stop sending PDFs to readers. Instead, we
want each time to e-mail a URL that links to a PDF stored on our
website. But many people report the link is just a static path when it
reaches them. They cannot launch the document. One person could launch
by pasting the link into his browser. One person reported that the PDF
came alive when he manually launched Acrobat Reader, but this did not
work for other people. We use Acrobat 6.0 to make PDFs. What could be
happening and how do we rectify it? Many thanks.

It may be that the problem is not with the PDF, but with the URL. Is
the email that's being sent an HTML email, or plain text? If it's
HTML, does your URL have href anchor tags around it? i.e. (not sure
how Google Answers will render this) <a href="your URL">your URL</a>.
That's what makes an HTML link clickable. Some email clients will make
a URL without those href anchor tags clickable anyway, as an added
convenience to readers. And if it's a plain text email (which has no
mechanism for making URLs clickable), many email clients will make
them clickable anyway, again as a convenience to readers, but others
won't. The safest way to make the link clickable is to send an HTML
email with href anchor tags around the URL.

Hello,
how do you write URL? it should point to your pdf http://example.com/your.pdf .
If you use MS outlook (express too), URL should become underlined.
Try it by sending email to yourself. If you can open PDF, then it works.

Another question is, what email software is used by the readers.
I'm sure that MS software should open such URL (http://example.com)
and the others also, but maybe they have archaic programs :)