Big bad ugly blue links

One of my biggest pet peeves with designing for email, is how some email clients automatically take some text, such as "wibble@test.com" and turn it into a link without asking first. If you've gone to the trouble of adding color: #cc0000 to all of your text links, why overlook just one more? Perhaps you didn't want it to be a link but didn't consider how a client like Outlook 2007 would take the initiative?

Let's take a look at a disclaimer / unsubscribe message as an example. Whichever system you're using to send your mails, you should have some kind of pre-population available. So your unsubscribe message could look like this:

If you no longer wish to receive emails from Monkey Widgets Ltd, reply to this email with 'remove {email}' in the subject line.

Where {email} is the recipients email address.

Outlook 2007 would do this:

If you no longer wish to receive emails from Monkey Widgets Ltd, reply to this email with 'remove jo@bloggs.com' in the subject line.

Rather than leave the personalised text open to interpretation by those pesky email clients, just turn it into a link and force the colours you want. In this example, you may just want it to look like part of the text around it, in which case text-decoration: none is your friend. Just match the colour and away you go.

<a href="mailto:{email}" style="color: #666666; text-decoration: none;">{email}</a>

Nothing groundbreaking, just something to think about! This is something I now do for every client where they don't have a specific unsubscribe page set up (but have a system in place to capture unsubscribes from replies) more for the sake of completeness than anything else.

It's the little things that count after all!