Blue links on iOS iPhone iPad and HTML email signatures
You've created a HTML email signature and sent it to your iPad or iPhone on iOS. When you view the email signature on your iOS device, you notice that the phone number or address in your email signature has turned blue and are now links.
Why did this happen and how can you prevent blue links from ruining your HTML email signature design in the future? Read on for more information.
Apple does a lot of things right. One of them is making things easier for it's users. While it seems like a good idea to turn all phone numbers and addresses in HTML emails to clickable links and showing that they are clickable links by underlining them and highlighting them in blue, there is a problem. This does interfere with a beautiful HTML email signature design.
As of iOS 10, there have been some improvements made to the blue links. Instead of turning all phone numbers and addresses into blue, underlined links, Apple have decided to only make the links have a blue underline instead. So the text will remain the same color, but the underline is blue.
As Designers, we feel this is a much better choice. It still highlights that the link is clickable, but doesn't detract from the design (as much), like turning both the text and adding a blue underline did.
Want to know more?
We have tested all sorts of methods to override the code in iOS that turns these values into blue links, but unfortunately, HTML email signatures can be painful at the best of times.
While some blue links can be removed when you send bulk emails from programs like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, email clients are different. We simply can't include css headers or meta data to correct the issue, because most email clients strip these at either a sending or receiving level.