Prevent hyperlinks in HTML emails (namely Outlook)

Question

We've got some HTML emails that get sent out that show email addresses our service has blocked. When viewing the email in Outlook (and presumably in other clients as well) these plain-text email addresses get turned into clickable links that would compose a new message to this address when clicked.

Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Perhaps a meta tag with a flag that would prevent Outlook from converting these into clickable links?

Totaquine

If you have these links/addresses blocked anyway, why do you care? – Elyn

Not helpful. We don't want to have links everywhere, and they are all things you could accidentally click on to compose a new message. It's not something we want if we can avoid it. – Totaquine

Does this answer your question? How to disable an email link? – Bellanca

Answer 1

Most email clients strip out META tags, Javascript, and other types of code not necessary for email. Outlook is going to do what it wants with your email, so what you may want to do is wrap the addresses with your own anchor tag and use a blank HREF. Then, style the link to look like the rest of your text.

Germ

Very good idea, I'll give that a shot! From what I remember though, Outlook seems to override my link colors with the default blue, so that's my only concern that this point. Thanks. – Totaquine

I don't know why I didn't think of this. It works for me. I inline my styles in my emails and use the following css to style my 'empty links' so they look the same as normal text. The only downside is you can't seem to override the cursor: a[href=""] { text-decoration: none; color: #000; } – Overlong

Answer 2

I think a better answer is to formulate anything that you think a mail client might try to generate a link for in a way that breaks up the string a bit like this: https://mcmap.net/q/491171/-prevent-url-39-s-from-appearing-as-links-in-mail-clients

Sailboat

Hey Ryan, I like this solution of breaking the URLs into multiple spans. The problem is that it won't work properly in all email clients - e.g. Outlook 2007. – Housley

Answer 3

Add a dash or brackets to the link to prevent it turning into a hyperlink.

-https://www.example.com

[https://www.example.com]

Uncomfortable