Question: Google analytics offers the nice feature of letting one know, where a user is coming from. 

We are currently sending out emails containing links to our website and I would like to know how many people click on that link. 

For that I was hoping that there exists some Web service which allows one to register a url www.myurl.com. The Web service would then generate a new url something like www.service.com/myurl which redirects to wherever myurl.com was pointing in the first place. 

By including the redirect url in the emails, it would easy to see how many people actually clicked on the link. 

If there is an alliterative solution for the above scenario I am more than interested in learning about it.

Answer: 
You can use [Google Analytics URL builder](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en) to construct your URL's in emails and then view visits to your website via these URL's in the 'Campaigns' section of Google Analytics and drill down, segment, create custom reports as you see fit.
I use `bitly.com` which gives me a breakdown of country, of websites, and the number of hits in each. With an upgrade can give me a lot more tracking visits info. I can also customise (tag) my new URL. There are many other shortening URL sites which do the same. Just Google URL shortning sites