Getting Rid of 'Mail To:' in E-mail Links

Jennifer has a Word document that contains a link to an e-mail address. When she creates a hyperlink to the e-mail address, Word automatically adds "mail to:" in front of the e-mail address. Jennifer doesn't want this to appear, as she feels it looks unprofessional; she only wants the e-mail address itself to show. She is wondering how to get rid of that "mail to:" verbiage.

The thing to remember is that a hyperlink is composed of two distinct parts: the link itself and the text displayed in the document. When you convert some text (such as your e-mail address) to a hyperlink, Word analyses the text, converts it to the right hyperlink format, and then uses that formatted text as both the link and the text to be displayed.

The "mailto:" text that you are seeing is required for the link to work. It represents the underlying protocol to be used to correctly handle the address. If you see an e-mail hyperlink on a Web page, the underlying code also includes the same protocol indicator.

What you need to do is to change the display text without changing the underlying link, which must still contain the "mailto:" verbiage. You can make the change in a couple of ways. First, you can do it manually by right-clicking the hyperlink and choosing Edit Hyperlink from the resulting Context menu. This displays the Edit Hyperlink dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)

In the dialog box, change the contents of the Text to Display field; this is what is displayed in the document for the hyperlink. Make sure that you don't change anything in the link field. When you click OK, the hyperlink is updated and the "mailto:" verbiage no longer appears.

If you have a large number of such hyperlinks to fix, then you can use the Find/Replace capabilities of Word to make the change. Before doing the change, make sure that field codes are not displayed in your document. (You want to see the results of the field codes, not the codes themselves. How you do this has been covered in other WordTips.) Then, follow these general steps:

1. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
2. In the Find box, enter "mailto:" (without the quotes).
3. Leave the Replace With box empty.
4. Click on Replace All.

That's it; Word replaces all the instances of "mailto:" that it finds. Since you didn't have field codes displayed, only the display text (the result of the field codes) is affected; the underlying link is not changed.