Working with apps in dark mode is a great trend and I love it!

On this post, I am going to explore how nicely it plays with the email user experience, and more specifically iOS email clients, where marketing email content is usually designed around white themes.

Test subjects are the 3 email clients I have been using in the past few years: Airmail, Gmail and Hey.

Let's take as a sample a newsletter email from Transifex, related to an API deprecation announcement. This is a rich HTML email, with table structure, background color, links and images.

In light mode, the clients display the content as:

Switching to dark mode, the equivalent display is:

It looks like Gmail is doing a great job at modifying the colors of the HTML content to make it fit with the dark mode. Thumbs up!

Airmail and Hey, keep the original colors as is, adding some rounded borders to make the content look like a card within the main app area.

The second experiment is around sending casual text email, with a pinch of rich text formatting. 

Testing light mode looks like:

where I really like how Hey and Gmail choose a full white app background, making email text blend perfectly well with the rest of the app.

In dark mode, the same emails look like:

Both Gmail and Airmail, invert the text color and make a perfect blend with the client. On the other hand, Hey is keeping the original colors, similar to the rich HTML emails.

Comparing the three specific clients (there are tons of others out there), Gmail is doing the best job at respecting dark mode and is the winner of all three. This is the main client I use at work and it works like a charm in a dark environment.

Hey client, used for personal email, could probably do better on the dark mode experience. I have been using the Hey dark mode for about 6 months before eventually switching to light mode. Using Hey (and Airmail) in light mode somehow feels more "correct" for my taste.