Notifio is a desktop app that watches rental search pages and tells you when a new listing appears. The alert is the product. The app finds the listing, posts to the server, and the server sends an email, which for most users is the thing they actually look at.

That email is built by one module, server/src/lib/emails/alert.ts , which I have written about before: four alert emails, eight functions, and a five-line HTML escaper . That post was about the structure. This one is about the colours, because I measured them this morning and the result is worse than I expected in a specific and embarrassing way.

The whole palette is seven hex strings

$ grep -ro "#[0-9a-f] \{ 6 \} " src/lib/emails/alert.ts | sort -u #0a0a0a #171717 #262626 #404040 #525252 #a3a3a3 #fafafa

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Two of those are backgrounds: #0a0a0a is the page, #171717 is the card the content sits on. #262626 draws the rules between sections.…