Prevent Gmail from creating links for URLs and email addresses

Problem is Gmail automatically creates hyperlinks for all website URLs and email addresses. I do not want to create a link.

var mailClient = new SmtpClient();
var netMail = new MailMessage();

msg = "I do not want www.google.com as a link at recipient end. <br/>";
msg += "I want my email addrress [email protected] as html without a link";

var cr = new NetworkCredential("########", "###########");

netMail.From = new MailAddress("########@m####.###", "######");
netMail.To.Add(new MailAddress("[email protected]"));
netMail.Subject = "Test Mail";
netMail.IsBodyHtml = true;
netMail.Body = msg;

mailClient.Host = "xyz.com";
mailClient.Port = 25;
mailClient.EnableSsl = false;
mailClient.Credentials = cr;
mailClient.Send(netMail);

Any solution?

Solution 1:

I had a same issue and found out if you use email like this;

<a rel="nofollow" style='text-decoration:none; color:#333'>[email protected]</a>

email providers does not tend to follow email as a link.

Hope this helps.

Solution 2:

I was able to get around this issue just by adding <a style="color: #000000">link text</a> (notice there is no href).

I haven't tried using attributes besides style but I would imagine you could. The email system that I use (Blackbaud NetCommunity) will strip out a plain <a> tag, so I had to have at least one attribute.

Solution 3:

There's no way to stop creating URLs, because its automatically checked by the email provider that whether the text is a valid URL.

Only way to overcome this is, deceiving the parser. Just put spaces, HTML tags, whatever in such a way that the parser can't identify like URL etc.

Here are a few code examples:

http:<span>//foolishedsiteparser.com</span>
_http://www.parsersmashed.com
noonesemail<x>@</x>linkdead.com>

And the result is the following:

http://foolishedsiteparser.com
_http://www.parsersmashed.com
[email protected]