Email Marketing Voodoo - MindComet

Aug11

tips, yahoo mail, default link color

Override Yahoo’s Dreaded Default Link Color

Have you noticed your emails showing up with defaulted dark blue links across your emails in Yahoo Mail? Are you as annoyed as me? Yes and yes? Good.

CampaignMonitor has recently revealed what’s happening and how to prevent it.

Basically, Yahoo is adding a CSS class called “.yshortcuts” to all links within your email which includes a default color of #366388. Bummer.

But there’s an easy fix for this and there are two ways you can go about implementing it.

Within your style tag, paste the following:

<style type=&quot;text/css&quot;>
   div { color: #CCCCCC }
   a { color: #456456 }
   .yshortcuts { color: #CCCCCC } /* Body text color */
   .yshortcuts a span { color: #456456 } /* Link text color */
</style>

Then for every link, use the class “yshortcuts” within a div tag.

You can also apply this fix inline like so:

<a href=“#“ style=“color:#456456; text-decoration:none;“><span style=“color:#456456;“>Link</span></a>

This is a little repetitive, but it’s a sure-fire way of preventing your links from turning up blue in Yahoo!.

Unfortunately this will not prevent Yahoo! from adding links to physical addresses and the like (called Yahoo! Shortcuts). It will only prevent the embedded links in your email from turning blue.

Also, this is only appearing in the new Yahoo! Mail, not Yahoo! Classic.

Posted by Bryan Quilty on Aug. 11, 2010

Comments

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Thanks so much for this!! It’s been driving me nuts!!! Just have to say.. What *!^*& genius at yahoo decided to control the link color - WTF!!!

Posted by Photoman on 08/25/2010 10:39 AM

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The fact that Yahoo is doing this is a bummer. Although, as you mentioned, what really burns is when they add ‘shortcut links’ right on top of your text! It makes emails look more spammy by adding clutter. Also, what about subscriber experience? We spend all this time building reputation and credibility as email marketers. Who’s to say subscriber aren’t confused by this? What happens when a subscriber clicks on one of these Yahoo-added links then has a bad experience? That can reflect poorly on the sender, dispite the fact that the sender of the email has no control over it.

Posted by Chris Bryan on 10/01/2010 01:56 PM

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iOS Mail might be breaking your beautiful email layouts! http://t.co/EKrlE384 <- Find out how to defeat autolinking in iOS Mail.

Dec. 21, 2011 4:51 PM

@emailvoodoo