How do I stop Outlook.com from following links in email?

Question

As part of account registration I send an email to the new user with a one-time verification link which confirms the existence of their email address and automatically signs them in. However, I've noticed that the verification script is run when the email is opened -- before the link itself is clicked. My assumption is that my email client (Outlook.com in this case) has some sort of crawler which is following the link in the email when it is opened.

Assuming I'm correct (and if I'm not, please correct me), and leaving aside what is potentially a severe breach of privacy (as that's off-topic here) is there anything I can do to stop this from happening?

To confirm that it is indeed Outlook.com I checked the User Agent, which is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0 (I'm using Chrome on a Mac) and the remote address, which is 132.245.26.156 (owned by Microsoft).

Answer 1

I believe this is related to the "Link Preview" feature of Outlook.com.

Outlook will detect a valid link and display a preview in the email.
Somehow it will be considered a "click" from the user.

Ideally, users would need to have the feature disabled.