Apple Mail Background White Because of HTML Signature

Question

I have created an e-mail-signature in HTML and I am using it with the native Apple Mail-app on Mac and iPhone.
I am using Dark Mode, too, but sadly, the background of my emails turns white if I use my signature. I tested it, and it's because of the image I included in the signature.

Is there any way to prevent Apple Mail from showing the white background? I want the background to be dark (just as with plain text-emails). The option "Use dark backgrounds for messages" in the settings of Apple Mail is activated and in my HTML code I do not define a background color…

I'm on macOS Catalina 10.15.7 and have Apple Mail version 13.4.
This is the HTML code for my signature (I posted it without my real contact information here, of course). Everything is working correctly, just the background is white.














    
        
            
        
        
             
        
        
            
                
                    
                        MY NAME
                    
                
                
                    
                        MY EMAIL ADDRESS
                    
                
                
                    
                        domain.com · LinkedIn

Here's an screenshot of the email signature (black boxes for privacy reasons). The background of the email turns white as soon as I send the email or save it as a draft. If I edit the draft later, the background stays white.

Thank you for your answer!

user_15980283 · Answer

I had the same problem (or at least it sounds almost identical) and I think just worked around it. Are you letting Gmail resize the images? Like, are you selecting "small", "medium", or "large" size?

The solution for me was to upload the images at the exact resolution I needed, and force Gmail to show them "original" upload size. Now the background is showing up black again in dark mode, with no extra html, css, etc required. It seems to be a bug/issue between Apple's mail apps and Gmail with image resizing.

I was pulling my hair out over this all night because it was definitely triggered by adding an image, and I knew others had it working. I searched and found nothing but your thread. But I finally got it to work, I hope this solves your issue too!

user_13976509 · Answer

on MacOS Big Sur 11.3.1 Apple Mail Version 14.0 (3654.80.0.2.43)

everything works fine, so maybe it's an old version problem?

user_8942566 · Answer

Apple Mail will allow dark mode unless you have an image, in which case you need to carefully set it up to retain dark mode capability. If you haven't set it up right, it will turn off dark mode - hence the white background.

It looks like you have the parts setup okay: however, you could try putting it in the section above the .

But it looks like you're missing what you'd like the background colour to be.

So, put a class on the body: , and add some styles to that class:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { 
.darkmode { background-color: #111111; }
.darkmode h1, .darkmode p, .darkmode span, .darkmode a { color: #ffffff; }
}

Apple Mail Background White Because of HTML Signature

3 Answers