Turning Off Outlook 2003's Automatic URL Recognition

Do you want to turn off automatic URL recognition on your machine? Find out how to obtain the new hotfix that will turn it off for you.

Sue Mosher

November 28, 2006

1 Min Read
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Can I turn off Microsoft Office Outlook 2003's automatic recognition of hyperlinks in email messages?

Out of the box, Outlook 2003 will always turn a URL in the body of an email message into a clickable link if you type a space or punctuation character after it or press Enter to start a new paragraph. Until now, there was no way to turn that behavior off, but Microsoft has released a hotfix that adds support for a new registry key to turn off automatic URL recognition. You can learn more about this hotfix and how to obtain it in the Microsoft article "When you type a URL in an e-mail message in Outlook 2003, the URL is recognized as a hyperlink" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=904637). The hotfix requires Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2). After you install the hotfix, navigate in the registry editor to the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice11.0OutlookPreferences subkey and add a new DWORD value named DisableAutoUrlCompletion. To disable URL recognition and hyper-linking, set the value for DisableAuto UrlCompletion to 1.

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