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_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Preferences subkey and add a new DWORD value named DisableAutoUrlCompletion. To disable URL recognition and hyper-linking, set the value for DisableAuto UrlCompletion to 1.
