Mobile Safari/ iPhone Mail.app HTML design issues: prevent autolinking and styling auto-links (dates, addresses, etc.)

Question

i am trying to design an HTML e-mail that should also look good when it is read on mobile devices. My biggest problems are with the iPhone (iOS 4): its mostly undocumented \

Answer 1

I actually figured out a trick to do this. It's pretty horrible, but it works. You can read my post about it at http://commondream.net/post/8933806735/avoiding-data-detectors-in-ioss-mail-app, but the general gist is that data detectors won't link content that is already a link in HTML emails, so you can turn something like:

Tuesday

into:

Tuesday

It's horrible code, but it keeps the data detectors from happening with only a couple of drawbacks, namely ugly markup and the mail client scrolling to that particular item if you click on it.

All of that said, I think it's pretty limited when you should disable data detectors. I had an email that listed weather forecasts by day of week, and felt like no user would ever want to mark that information down in their calendar, but I'd say you shouldn't disable data detectors if you ever think that they could actually be useful.