CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urloutlookhyperlink
user1041029
user1041029

Reputation: 143

Is there a way to disable email engines from automatically hyperlinking a URL?

One of my clients wants to disable the URL to be shown as a hyperlinked URL, it has to be recognized as plain text, this is what I have tried:

<a href="..." style="text-decoration:none!important">ur<!comments>l</a>

I have also tried to remove the <a></a> tag, as well as remove "http://" of the URL, none of them worked in Outlook. Outlook still recognized it as a hyperlink.

Anybody have any workaround here?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 29485

Answers (10)

Keyslinger
Keyslinger

Reputation: 5274

I had success with janusoo's solution for years until for some reason it began to introduce line breaks on some clients. I found that I could proceed with &#8203;

www.websitename.&#8203;com

Upvotes: 2

Brett Hamm
Brett Hamm

Reputation: 23

I contacted Gmail's support and spoke with a department manager for Apple Care. This is expected behavior and cannot be prevented. These hacks no longer work, and if implemented could result in your IP being listed as a phishing operation. You're dancing around security issues here. I would suggest revising your content strategy.

The only thing you can do currently is wrap all email addresses in mailto links and phone numbers in tel links. There are no other options available as of 2017.

Upvotes: 2

Jan Dirk Zijlstra
Jan Dirk Zijlstra

Reputation: 21

My solution for this is 

<a href="#" style="text-decoration:none!important">http://...</a>

Upvotes: 2

obai
obai

Reputation: 417

This one worked for me. It is a combination of Scott's answer and David K. Hess's comment.

Break your url using <span>. However, you need to break it in a way that they are not matched as url when the mail client scans it. 

eg: http<span>://</span><span>google.</span>com

Upvotes: 6

janusoo
janusoo

Reputation: 141

Credit belongs to my coworker, actually. Seems to work in all clients that we tested.

www.websitename.<img src="" width="0" height="0">com

An empty image tag with 0 width and 0 height. Insert it between the dot and the following text (in this case "com").

After we tried several things, he somehow suffered from a moment of inspiration/brilliance.

No visible spacing between the characters. Not sure what will happen if you copy/paste the string into a browser directly, though. It served my purpose of not allowing email clients to automatically make it a hyperlink, though.

Upvotes: 14

soulglider
soulglider

Reputation: 161

If you use &#46; to replace your '.' in your hyperlinks you'll solve Outlook 2007 Hyperlinking the URL.

Upvotes: 1

Kyle
Kyle

Reputation: 21

I have a similar issue with words like "chequed.com" and "interviewing.com" that are creating a hyperlink in my messages when I do not want it to.

The first step I took was to edit the HTML link tags.. but there weren't any.

After that, I went to the text in the email and added a very small space by using a fount of 8pt (im using an ESP, otherwise I would have gone with 1px)

This may help if you're having the same issue.

Upvotes: 2

Scott
Scott

Reputation: 309

There is a zero-width non-breaking space that I like to use: &#65279;

I place it in strategic places so that the URL does not get recognized as a URL, like so: http&#65279;://www&#65279;domain.&#65279;com.

This strategy has worked for me across platforms and rendering clients. Its advantages are twofold: 1) it prevents the client from auto-rendering text as a link, and 2) unlike other "non-breaking" zero-width space ascii codes (ie &#8302;), it wraps the entire URL if your URL happens to need it (instead of just the parts after the zero-width space).

Try it out.

Upvotes: 18

JimmyPena
JimmyPena

Reputation: 8764

You can turn off auto-hyperlinking in general. Here is a tutorial for Outlook 2007:

Turn automatic hyperlinking on or off

Upvotes: 2

ghoti
ghoti

Reputation: 46856

You might try using CSS to re-flow the text.

<p>www.example.<span style="float:left">http://</span>com/</p>

If the part with "http://" still gets marked as a URL, try breaking things up in different places.

One other trick would be to replace the periods with some other Unicode character that LOOKS like a period but actually isn't. For example, "⠄" (U-2840) is a Braille single-dot.

Alas (!) I don't have any Microsoft applications I can test this with, but good luck with it. :)

Upvotes: 1

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