How to prevent email clients from automatically adding tel: tag

Question

I am trying to send a form by email to a site admin, I am using the PHP library 'SwiftMailer'

It is meant to send user information including his / her IP address and some URLs, when the email arrives in the inbox of Gmail and other email clients the URL automatically becomes an anchor link and I had to work around this by adding span tags like:

< span > ht < /span> tp: < span > // < /span> and so on

and it worked and gmail displays the URL as text, not a clickable anchor

now when i send the visitor's IP, the mail client is adding tel:ip if i send 127.0.0.1 it shows up tel:127.0.0.1, clickable and Skype is running when clicked

The spans trick isn't working for this

any suggestions? thanks

Answer 1

I had a similar issue where a series of numbers is getting turned into a tel: link even though it is not a phone number. I added this meta tag to the head section:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

Here is the article that helped me out.

Just remember that if your email DOES have phone numbers in it, you will now have to specify the links for those in order to provide your mobile users to call it from the email.