How do I stop Outlook from rendering an email address as a mailto: link?
Outlook doesn't recognize this pattern as an email: @[text]@[text].[text]
Thus adding before the email:
<a style="color: black; text-decoration: none"><font style="display: none">@</font>**email**</a>
and
<style>font {display: none}</style>
in the <head> tag will remove the mailto link.
I found your question through google, and hours later I found an answer that works for me for the same problem.
Wrap the email address inside an href with "#" as the target, and set the color to black and text decoration to none. Additionally, put the email address in another font tag, inside the anchor, with font size and type as well.
Like this:
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1" color="#CCCCCC">
This e-mail was sent to
<a href="#" style="color:#CCCCCC; text-decoration:none;">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1" color="#CCCCCC">
[email]</font></a>.</font>
The result is that the email address becomes a clickable link, but 1) it doesn't look like a clickable link and 2) the link doesn't go anywhere nor does it attempt to perform a mailto:
It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me for now.