I’m working on a web app that sends emails to our users. These emails include URLs that users need to copy and paste manually for security reasons. The problem I’m running into is that email programs like Outlook and Gmail automatically turn any text with https:// into clickable links.
I need to find a way to stop this automatic link creation. I was thinking maybe removing the https:// part might work, but our security team wants the full URL visible. Is there a trick to include https:// while preventing the auto-linking feature?
The URLs are built dynamically using C# when we generate the emails. Any suggestions on how to format the URL text so it won’t become clickable would be really helpful.
I’ve run into this exact problem. Replace the colon in https: with the HTML entity : so you get https://example.com. Email clients will show it as a normal URL, but won’t auto-link it. Users can copy-paste the text and it works fine in browsers since they handle HTML entities. Your security team stays happy because the full URL is visible and there’s no weird characters to confuse people.
Drop zero-width spaces into the URL like https://example.com - email clients won’t see it as a clickable link but people can still copy/paste the whole thing. In C# just use \u200B to add them programmatically
Here’s what works for me: add a space before the period in URLs. Like https://example .com instead of https://example.com. Email clients won’t auto-link it, and people just delete the space when they copy-paste. Way simpler than HTML entities or zero-width characters - anyone can figure out what to fix. Been doing this for two years with zero complaints.