Defeating iOS Mail’s autolinking feature
Are you checking your email on iOS Mail as part of your QA process? If not, your email layouts might be breaking in unexpected ways.
When displaying an email, iOS Mail parses through the text and if it sees a string that it recognizes as a date or address, it will automatically create an iCal or Address Book link (respectively). While this feature is a nice to have for the email recipient, it’s a disaster for unknowing email marketers.
Here’s an example:
BEFORE
AFTER
As you can see the string “12/22/11” is converted into a link with disastrous results. Adding css styles like “text-decoration: none ! important” or any other styles to try to override have no effect. Please don’t start cursing Apple or replace all of your date strings with images. There is a workaround.
The only way to defeat the autolinking feature is to beat iOS Mail to the punch—turn your date and address strings into links before it does. Wrap those strings in A tags with the href attribute equal to #. Include your desired styling and voila, iOS Mail will ignore them completely. The only downside is that you have links that serve no purpose and link to #.
Have you encountered this issue? Do you have any other workarounds to share?
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Dec. 21, 2011
Comments
Thanks for the great tip Justine.
Method #2 for defeating iOS autolinking…BAM!
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on 12/21/2011 05:27 PM
Hi Jeremy! This had been bugging me for quite some time. Since iOS supports embedded styles, you can also fix those ugly blue links that way: http://litmus.com/blog/remove-blue-links-ios
Posted by Justine Jordan on 12/21/2011 05:03 PM