How to Stop Email Clients from Auto-Linking URLs and Domains
If you’ve ever tried sending out HTML emails, you know how frustrating it can when your email starts to look differently when viewed through different email clients. This is because different email clients are developed by different companies. As result, you might have the same HTML coding that renders differently across different email clients.
For instance, some email clients like Mac OS or Outlook will automatically convert URLs or website addresses into a hyperlink even though you have not set them up as a hyperlink within the HTML. So, how do you prevent this from happening? Well, I just discovered a nifty little work-around that works quite well without visually changing anything.
Say you have this domain name within your email HTML formatted in plain text: www.example.com
All you have to do is insert an empty image tag between the “dot” and the “com”. Like this:
www.example.<img src=”” width=”0″ height=”0″>com
This should prevent any text URLs from turning into a hyperlink when viewing the email through certain email clients.
Another solution:
According some Mac users, the above solution may not work. So, here’s another work-around that may do the trick. Insert a zero-width non-breaking space in the domain name like this:
www.example⁠.com or www.example⁠.com
Feel free to use both solutions together to ensure you cover all email clients.