How to get Gmail to colour your links Published February 3, 2012 It has become apparent that when your email has a text link that you have coded to be black using something along the lines of: Pure360 Gmail will not display it as black, in fact it will default it to a blue! Well, we weren’t going to accept that from Google, so we set to finding out why it was happening and the best way to ensure the recipient experience is as consistent as possible, and to finally determine how we can understand how gmail colour links First steps We did some mad testing… The way the colour was being coded: #000, #000000, Black, hsl(0, 0%, 0%) With and without: DOCTYPE, HTML tags, Header Tags, Body tags All the black links were black, except the hsl ones. Then we sent just the link and no other code and the link was blue. The solution So we have decided that in order to ensure that your text links are black, you have to add inline css text colour to the anchor tag’s parent tag – this is most commonly used but can be any tag, for instance a. The colour used in the parent tag can be any colour at all, it just needs to exist. Tah-dah! The links in the TD that had the style tag on it all coloured as they were supposed to be, except the hsl one. The link at the bottom, without at wrapping styles went blue. Thanks to my colleague Andy Thorpe and John at Email on Acid for their contributions in helping to figure out a solution to this problem!