Ugly: Gmail turns your black email-links into blue ones. Here’s a solution.

Gmail is on the rise. With 350 million active users it would be close in on hotmail. Which is remarkable; not only because Gmail started nearly a decade later than “HoTMail”. (I doubt that Microsoft can win-back some with “switch from gmail to hotmail“-campaigns.) Also here in Germany, Gmail nearly duplicated its market shares year-on-year (see market-shares).

So … the more email recipients use gmail, the more important is it to make sure everything looks fine. But the devil is often in the detail – e.g. in the link color …

Prevent Gmail from rendering black links blue

When building my newsletter-template some days ago I noticed that Gmail turns links, which have been style-formatted black using CSS (style="color:#000000"), into blue ones. The color-attribute just gets stripped. And depending on the environment of the link, this can be disturbing.

What can you do to prevent this from happening? Two possible solutions would be:

1. additionally wrapping a font-tag around the link-text:
   <a><font color="#000000">linktext</font></a>
2. making the color slighly lighter:
   the human eye can’t see any difference between #000000 and #010000, but the latter one works fine with Gmail