This isn't at all what I was looking for. I want to disable these features on all sites on my iPhone, but this article just explains how to disable them on my site on all iPhones.

a:-webkit-any-link {
color: inherit !important;
text-decoration: none;
}
did the job ^^

Where does one put this code?

This worked perfect. Thank you for sharing!

Wicked, absolutely did the job for me also. The above didnt work and the links were still blue during Litmus testing.

For people who say you should not disable these links under any circumstances: Here is one example that brought me to this page. We are doing a production of the Broadway show 42nd Street. We found that in our mailings, the show title kept appearing as a link, and if you click on it, sure enough you get a map showing the location of 42nd Street, NYC. (We are in Manhattan). Obviously this is not what we had in mind!

I find that declaring style=“color:#..... !important;text-decoration:none !important;” INLINE does the trick almost every time -no matter what device or client! It helps to have apple selectors in head, but as mentioned, doesn’t work in GMAIL. This technique is what I use for all html auto signatures with multiple links. Works in Outlook and everywhere else -on first or originating send. Sometimes I see it break on replies or forwards... only “email Gods” know why!!!

I seriously cannot believe that this pursuit and debate and hacks persist and grow in the absence of the base considerations.

Please see comment posted in Litmus Community: https://litmus.com/communit...

First, format detection is a service. People want it. People use it. Stop trying to break it.

Second, blue underscored text is the defacto standard and most widely recognized affordance of a link. If your link is blue, it will be more understood and more likely to be used. If your other links do not have enough affordance, they will have no engagement. Stop criminalizing the appropriate practice of link affordance.

Finally, you don’t design email for designers – or brands. You design it for people – the audience that opens it. Among that audience, no 2 people are likely to view email the same way. Beyond the hundreds of nuanced variations between what email clients can render are thousands of variations of user preferences and context and millions of variations of “shit happens”. Stop imagining that email can (or should) look the same for everyone.

I completely agree with your statement. The blue colored link is widely recognized for what it is. Nobody opening up an email on their phone is going to think twice about if that blue matches the theme or not. And if it was only the links that linked to somewhere, I would leave it alone. However, I discovered, especially with some of the newer iPhone updates, every single date, time, and phone number is blue. Most eblasts I send out, doesn't matter too much, I leave it alone. But, some eblasts I send out, especially ones revolving around horse shows are loaded with dates, times, places, scoring, and other numbers. There was so much blue on the screen the user wouldn't even be able to tell if there was an actual link. It not only looked terrible, but it became almost hard to read. On top of that, a couple of the dates listed (that were not links) were on top of a dark purple background. The blue made it almost impossible to read.

As you will notice, in most of the comments posted, people are trying to get rid of the blue for things that aren't actually links.

I understand all of the considerations and many of the instances of “undesirable” outcomes. I would argue that those instances are all the product of design.

There are many solutions.

No solution should prevent a person from taking advantage of format detection. No solution should strip link affordance. Change it, sure – as long as it is understood. Remove it, no.

Is there any fix to remove the blue links in Android native? I've tried some fixes without results, besides I can not use the href # , any other ideas?

I tried using the methods described above with no luck. Testing on Litmus, the iPhone 6 was still receiving all the dates and phone numbers underlined in blue. I did, however, figure out a round about way of solving the issue. Probably not the most ideal way, but it works. Trick the iPhone from recognizing it as a date/phone number. Example: Your offer is valid through September#8203 5#8203, 2013#8203.
Note: Before the pound sign put '&' (when I put the & in front, it did not show up in my post.)

There is a problem though when i use it with mac mail. The preview looks okay but because i need to only use the body it does show the blue lines again.

use zero width space in between the digits - worked for me

& # 6 5 2 7 9 ;

Thank you, but as of October 2016, none of the methods suggested in the article or in the comments worked for me. I used method #5 from the article, the meta tags method, and the method suggested in http://removebluelinks.com/, with no luck. I sent the emails from Outlook 2013 (maybe the culprit?) and received them on an iPhone 6 on iOS 10.

kind a use full !

I'm working with ExactTarget through Salesforce and the platform strips all the heading code and css. Any work arounds or tricks to use for straight up inline styling?

this seems better:

a[href^="x-apple-data-detectors:"] {
color: inherit;
text-decoration: inherit;
}

This seems to do the trick:

<meta name="format-detection" content="date=no">
<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

These solutions are no longer working on the latest iOS... at least the very last one doesn't. Any other ideas?

Is there also a solution for the blue links when you copy/paste the the html code as a email signature. I got it working a while ago but cant remember what i did.... i do have the appleLinks added and also a css for all links. Inlining the css doesnt seem to add visited, active link color to inline

So am I understanding correctly that your preferred solution would require us to anticipate in advance any words that the mail app would turn into a link, and wrap it in a span? So, the word "tonight", "tomorrow", "next Monday", etc etc etc? Way too much work, and will fail frequently.

Big thanks, worked with meta! Nice work.

I like to work with these mobile features - ultimately you're giving your users a richer experience if they can create calendar dates or find you on a map in the instant way their phone has taught them.
It's a shame Android doesn't do such a consistent job with date ranges.

I implemented #5, http://stackoverflow.com/qu... and http://removebluelinks.com/ and it appears to work correctly in iOS9.

Been running tests all afternoon, and it appears that with recent iOS updates, none of these solutions work across all iOS devices.

Has anyone else had recent success?

Experiencing this myself; looks like iOS9 has killed off these solutions.

Just recently tried it today, Feb 15th 2016. The #5th solution works. Meaning the .appleLinksWhite a {

color:#ffffff;

text-decoration: none;

}

and styling the Dates/Time/Address

solution works for the latest iOS9.2.1

I have been using the 5th solution for a while now with no issue. But then I discovered it stopped working. At least on iPhone 6. Did anybody else notice that too?

Anyway, Christian's trick: a[href^="x-apple-data-detectors:"] { ...
is working like a charm. Thanks for this Christian!

Eric at Nest

A variant of test 4 that works for calendar links:

a[href^="x-apple-data-detectors:"] { ... }

I'm very disappointed at the status of this problem. As a newsletter developer, I don't want to be concerned with what will automatically become links in my newsletters! I want to specify a link if it needs to be a link! So when I ask how the heck do I stop this, I am rather offended when the answer is something like "I see no problem with it"! It is a problem! The stupid "autolinks" in Apple and Android and web-mail are even turning the "9:9", for example in "Psalm 9:9" into a link to a calendar app! They even turn the word "today" in "Today we have the technology" into a link! Give me a break!

Please don't tell me I must accept a complex workaround for every set of digits I put in a newsletter to prevent them from becoming links! Please don't tell me I have to surround the word "today" and "tomorrow" with a "no decoration anchor tag" to stop it from becoming a link! THIS IS A PROBLEM! I should have a simple solution that disables autolinks, and then it is up to me to ensure an item is a link if it needs to be! I propose something like:
<meta name="autolink" content="no"/>
which is accepted by all devices and browsers!

Well.. i would recommend this site http://removebluelinks.com/

As of 10/28/2016 this one works on all apple devices iOS9. Thanks a lot!

FYI: This is working on iOS Mail App, but not on OSX in Apple Mail (tested in 7.3). A workaround for Apple Mail would be to wrap the Linking text in an anchor as suggested here: http://commondream.tumblr.c...

Thanks for sharing, Henrik! Hadn't seen that before—nice tool!

YES! That's fantastic.
Especially considering #5 doesn't work despite being the recommended one.

Hi Michael. What issues are you having with the 5th solution? It works for us!

Incidentally, Just recently tried #5 solution on Feb 15th 2016 & the verdict is The #5th solution works for ensuring dates/times are not auto blue links in iOS 9.2.1.

THIS works -->

<head><style type="text/css">.appleLinksWhite a {

color:#ffffff;

text-decoration: none;

}
</style></head>

and then styling the Dates/Time/Address
with XXX works for the latest iOS9.2.1

Oh really? I tested it on an iphone 4s and still had blue underlined links.
Thinking about it, perhaps alink and vlink were overriding it. Either way the removebluelinks.com css technique is dead efficient..
perhaps worth mentioning as one of your tests in this post?

That may have been it! I'll definitely give the tool a test and, if it works, then I'll add it to the post. Cheers!

Cracking!
The beautiful march of progress.. in defiance of apple.

Lauren_Litmus - Have you been able to do a comparison between the #5 solution vs removebluelinks.com? My biggest question is whether the removebluelinks.com approach would result in false negatives. In other words, this should still show as a link <a href="tel:417-000-000">417-000-000</a>.

Thank you for #4! I normally use a version of #5 where I have spans within spans, with the outer-most span using both a class and inline-styles, but for some reason I could not style a phone number mixed with letters in iOS, something like 1-855-MY-BLECH. The other numbers where the spans within spans worked were all numeric, and the area code was surrounded by parenthesis and no-leading number: (855) 234-5678. Not sure if that difference was causing an issue. Anyway thanks again.

Just use an <a> tag. Like this:

<a href="#" style="cursor:text; text-decoration:none; color:#333333;">PESKYBLUETEXT</a>

This appears to work for domains, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, dates, times, and probably anything else that gets blue-linked.

I'm preparing an html signature in apple mail but the .mailsignature does not have a <head> tag, where can I define the inline css for solution 5?

We tested HTML emails sent from services like MailChimp—I'm not sure if you can make these types of edits to emails going out from a mail client like Apple Mail. Why not try the Community? https://litmus.com/community

Similar issues crop up in Gmail and other webmail clients from time to time, as well. We'll add it to our list of potential article ideas!

Why did you bother with the first 4 when the most obvious solution is also the winning one?

Hi Gerhard! Our previous post (https://litmus.com/blog/rem... had been extremely popular and amassed numerous tips and advice in the comments section. In this post, we tested out all of the suggested workarounds that were presented in the older post. Hope that explains why there are numerous solutions!