Stopping gmail from displaying a url as a link within a textarea

Question

Hello,

I'm building an app that spits out an email...The email has a url in in a textarea (along with some other copy) for copying and pasting (like into a blog/forum post). So I output this:

<textarea>http://www.somesite.com/your-link&lt;/textarea&gt;

and gmail does this:

<textarea>
<a href = 'http://www.somesite.com/your-link'&gt;http://www.somesite.com/your-link&lt;/a&gt;
</textarea>

Is there a way of stopping this happening? I've tried using ascii codes instead, too.. (http://www.somesite.com) to no avail.

Any help much appreciated :)