Well, first off, using black as a background color is incredibly insensitive, and here's why: My email application is set to default to black font. If I get an email from you, and hit reply, my text won't show up. Make sense? Okay, so my thinking is that you're using either RTF format or HTML format and your Yahoo account is saying "no way am I showing this to you in html 'cause you won't be able to reply to it!" Anyway, HTML uses body tags. Go to a page with a black background and you'll see an html tag that says: <body bgcolor="#000000"> If your email application (Yahoo) doesn't use html, then it doesn't see the "background color is black" tag.