How to disable an email link?

Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3 and I would like to disable an email address link in a HTML email.

For example, if in an email I send some raw HTML like

Answer 1

You can try

Hi, you email is:<br />
test&#64;email&#46;com

Answer 2

Even I had the same problem. Gmail would detect and convert mail addresses and ip addresses to links. I used string.replace to enclose dots (.) and @ in blocks. And that works fine for me. sample python code looks like.

text = myname@gmail.com
chars = ['.','@']
encloseIn = 'span'

for char in chars:
    text = string.replace(text, char, '<'+encloseIn+'>'+char+'</'+encloseIn+'>')

Answer 3

The only way to get around this is to convert the email address into an image and include that in the email. Of course this means the user might choose to not download the image, which would mean they won't get the email address either.

What it really comes down to is that you can't control what Gmail or any other email client does once it receives an email, so there isn't another way around this. It's Gmail's, or any other email client's, choice to do what they want with emails, and that includes hyper-linking email addresses.

If you are very adamant about not converting emails into hyperlinks you can try to do other things to conceal the fact that it's an email, like writing it out instead:

Hi, your email is:
test at email dot com

Of course this is probably more confusing. If I were you, I would simply settle for the fact that Gmail will hyper-link your emails.

Answer 4

You just need to add the "zero width space" character, his code in HTML is:

​

This code adds a space in the string where you need. For a respectable solution you need to complement this method with a <nobr> tag, because with this tag you can prevent from breaking to the next line.

Answer 5

Late reply but i think I have found a way to get over this auto linking issue.

The easiest and fastest way is to add a zero width non joiner between each alphabets. Now that sounded hard so I developed a small script that made things easy for me. Run the code below, add email address (paste or type) and it adds the required code around the email address.

$('#userInput').keyup(function() {
    var s = $(this).val().trim();
    var text = "";
    for ( var i = 0; i < s.length; i++ )
        {
            text += s[i]+'&zwnj;' ;
        } 
    $('p').text( text );
});

#userInput{max-width:400px;width:100%;padding:10px 5px;}
*{outline:none;}
p,#userInput{font-family: 'Roboto', sans-serif;}
p{word-break:break-all;}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto" rel="stylesheet">
<input type="text" id="userInput" />

<p></p>

Answer 6

Reading all answers, I tried this in a Joomla article and it worked:

<p><strong>This is the email address: </strong><a name="whatever">youremail&#64domain.com</a></p>

Result:

This is the email address: youremail@domain.com

Worked on Chrome and Firefox.