I’m attempting to set a background color for my HTML email that will show up correctly in Gmail. I want the email’s overall background to be a light gray, but my current method doesn’t seem to work.
Here’s what I’ve tried:
<html>
<head>
<style>
.email-container {
background-color: #e0e0e0;
padding: 15px;
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="email-container">
<h1>Thanks for subscribing</h1>
<p>This email should appear with a gray background.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
When I test this in Gmail, the background remains white. I’ve learned that Gmail may remove some CSS properties, but I’m unsure how to best handle this. Could anyone share the proper way to implement background colors in Gmail? I’m in need of guidance.
This happens because Gmail’s CSS handling is super strict. Gmail usually ignores background colors on the body element completely. Here’s what worked for me: create a wrapper table with cellpadding and cellspacing set to zero. Then apply your background color directly to the table cells using both background-color CSS and the bgcolor attribute. Tables beat div containers every time in email clients. Also, Gmail sometimes plays nicer with background colors when you give it both hex and RGB values as backups. The trick is redundancy - hit your background styling from multiple angles. Use CSS properties AND HTML attributes to cover your bases across different email clients.
add style="background-color: #e0e0e0" directly on the body tag - skip the css classes. gmail ignores external styles but respects inline ones. also, wrap all in a table with bgcolor="#e0e0e0". it’s old school but works for gmail.
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Gmail strips external stylesheets and most CSS properties, so your approach won’t work. You need inline styles directly on HTML elements instead of CSS classes. Apply background-color inline on both your body tag and container div. Also add the bgcolor attribute as backup - some email clients handle HTML attributes better than CSS. I always set background colors on multiple levels since it keeps things consistent across different clients. Gmail also works better with table structures instead of divs sometimes. Your code looks fine otherwise, just switch to inline styling for email clients.