How do I stop Outlook from rendering an email address as a mailto: link?

Question

I am creating an HTML email to be sent to a user. If there is a valid email address to within an HTML email, Outlook will render it (normally helpfully) as a mailto: link. Unfortunately, that's not the desired behavior in the particular email I'm sending.

How do I stop Outlook from doing this?

Answer 1

As far as i know there is no way to do it, but you could try writing the email in a way that outlook does not recognize (i.e. try replacing the @ by it's &# unicode representation).

I'm no outlook expert and i never had this particular problem so i would be interested in an easier way, too.

Answer 2

after you paste the email, press backspace.

Answer 3

There is no way to do this. Outlook uses a text parser to look at the incoming email and if it finds something that matches its definition of an e-mail address (my guess is that it would be something like [text]@[text].[text]) then it adds a mailto: hyperlink on it.

This has nothing to do with the format you sent your mail in (text, RTF, or HTML). It also varies on the version of Outlook because it seems that Outlook 2007 is "smarter" at figuring out hyperlinks (both mailto and http) than 2003 is.

If you don't want the address to display as a link then I recommend either adding spaces to the text:

name @ company.com

or changing the @ sign to something that a human would understand but which Outlook would ignore:

name[AT]company.com

Or just tell your recipients not to click on it and see if they follow directions :)

Answer 4

Hi, I found your question through google, and hours later I found an answer that works for me for the same problem.

Wrap the email address inside an href with "#" as the target, and set the color to black and text decoration to none. Additionally, put the email address in another font tag, inside the anchor, with font size and type as well.

Like this:

<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1" color="#CCCCCC">
This e-mail was sent to 
<a href="#" style="color:#CCCCCC; text-decoration:none;">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1" color="#CCCCCC">
[email]</font></a>.</font>

The result is that the email address becomes a clickable link, but 1) it doesn't look like a clickable link and 2) the link doesn't go anywhere nor does it attempt to perform a mailto:

It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me for now.

Answer 5

Can you put it in a <pre>[email protected]</pre> tag?