How do you disable phone number linking in iPhone Mail app?

Question

My company is sending out digital email receipts and am running into issues where iPhone Mail is detecting numerical data and auto-linking it as a phone number. I've seen the meta tag that should fix the issue in Mobil Safari on the iPhone, but the trick doesn't appear to work for Mail.

Does anyone know how to do this? Manipulating the number itself to insert a hidden character won't work (to prevent Mail from detecting it) because its being dynamically populated.

Thanks!

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 02 '12 at 01:11

I had the exact same problem - UPCs in emailed receipts would be auto-detected as phone #s and make the emails look bad not to mention confusing with all the links. I discovered a trick that worked for me: I wrote a function that would take string data and embed zero-width non-join character (&zwnj;) every 3rd character (I picked 3 randomly, you could probably do fewer inserts and still disrupt but I haven't tested). My c# function looks like:

private string iPhoneDisruptAutoLinks(string val)
{
    StringBuilder newVal = new StringBuilder();
    int count = 0;
    foreach (char c in val.ToCharArray())
    {
        count++;
        if (count == 3)
        {
            count = 0;
            newVal.AppendFormat("&zwnj;{0}", c);
        }
        else
        {
            newVal.Append(c);
        }
    }

    return newVal.ToString();
}

So a UPC of 1234567890 would be rendered as:

123&zwnj;456&zwnj;789&zwnj;0

My tests on iPhone 4/4S worked great. I have not tested iPhone 3 or iPads.

This method also appears to disrupt the iPhone 4/4S address detection (which was another annoyance for us).

Hope this helps.

Thanks Ookep; I will be testing this – dscl Sep 14 '12 at 17:52 — dscl, Sep 14 '12 at 17:52

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 19 '11 at 23:41

0

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

Is this what you're looking for?

It's documented in Apple URL Scheme Reference.

answered Sep 19 '11 at 23:41

Adam Eberbach

12,309
6
62
114

2

Unfortunately that only appears to work within the Mobile Safari App and not within the Mail application. – dscl Sep 20 '11 at 12:59

How do you disable phone number linking in iPhone Mail app?

2 Answers2

Linked