Blog

In recent weeks, a couple of our customers have contacted us to report that links in their email campaigns have suddenly reverted to a default blue color in Gmail. Upon discussion with these customers and a little testing on our part, we found that any link with either style="color: #000000;" or a { color: black; } applied was having the color CSS property stripped from their code - therefore allowing Gmail's default stylesheet to go to town with their design.

While it's annoying that Gmail should make this rather arbitrary change, thankfully there's an easy fix. Cool customers Wilbert Heinen and Benjamin Kinzer both came up with the same solution - use a link color that's black, but not quite black. For example:

Alternately, you can use color: #000000 !important;, which oddly enough, doesn't get stripped out of the code.

In wondering what Gmail holds against the color black, we turned to Spinal Tap for answers:

When it comes to links in Gmail, anchor links can be 'none, none more black'.

Thanks to Wilbert and Ben for these fixes to a rather kooky new email rendering issue. If you see any further changes in Gmail, be sure to get in touch with us.

Remember that Pizza Express email that we featured in our 'Image blocking in email clients' post? The one that displays an impressive pixel-art fallback when images don't load? Well, our friends at Email Fail have found another impressive example from Mac. Check it out:

Images on:

Images off:

Given the amount of work put into this fallback, Becs at Email Fail is right to ask:

"I wonder if the general public will ever appreciate this as much as us email designers?"

Perhaps this is a clever shout-out to folks like us - an easter egg to those who intentionally turn off images in the inbox, a maker's mark amongst makers. To the Mac email designer, we tip our hats to you. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed.

For those wondering, this fallback is achieved by adding carefully cutting the image, assigning the pieces to individual table cells, then adding a bgcolor="" to each cell. Style Campaign has a free app for automatically converting images to HTML pixel-art to create a similar effect.

Thanks to Email Fail for sharing this full-of-email-win newsletter design with us!

We've posted a few general tips on how to avoid looking like a phisher, but this one is quite specific to senders using a @gmail.com or Google Apps-managed "From: address"in their campaigns. Recently, emails with @gmail.com From: addresses which did not send from a Gmail mail server have been flagged with the following warning in the inbox:

"If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like phishing attempts."
-'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail', Lifehacker

Soon after a customer mentioned seeing one of these scary messages, Lifehacker posted an example, explanation and fixes in their post, 'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail'. While this information is relevant when sending from a regular email client, there's only really one way to avoid these warnings when sending from an email marketing service like Campaign Monitor. That is, use an address other than an @gmail.com address. Or any webmail address, for that matter.

Walk away from webmail addresses

This warning is only one example of how webmail clients are trying to protect their customers from spam and web threats. After all, phishers very commonly use fake From: addresses / spoof mail headers to masquerade as legitimate senders. Gmail has good reason to look dimly upon email that's labelled as coming from them, but isn't being sent from their own servers.

We encourage our customers to avoid using a webmail address as their From: email address. Undoubtedly they will trigger warnings like this and potentially, deliverability issues in the future. Instead, we highly recommend purchasing a domain name from a registrar like Namecheap and setting up a you@yournewdomain.com -style email address. It's still okay to have this domain forward inbound mail to a webmail address, or alternately, you can use Google Apps to send and manage email from this domain directly. Note that Google Apps domains have also been known to throw similar warnings - to avoid this, it's a good idea to setup email authentication, which we'll go through in the next bit.

Don't forget to set up email authentication

Finally, we'd like to remind one and all to authenticate their sending domain in their accounts, especially when using Google Apps to manage their email. In essence:

"All the large ISPs are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up this system as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the destination inbox... Many ISP's like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps to build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chances of your emails being opened."

It only takes a few minutes for you, or your technical team to setup email authentication, but ensuring that your subscribers and ISP's know that your campaigns are definitely from you is well worth the effort.

Finally, If you have any questions about email authentication, get in touch with our team - we're here to make sure your campaigns not only look good, but make it into as many inboxes as possible, too.