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There's a lot going on in the email world right now – *eh hem* Apple Mail Privacy Protection. But I thought we'd take a moment and look at an email client behavior that's been around for a while – clipping emails in Gmail.
What are we talking about here? When you send an email to Gmail, sometimes part of it is cut off and replaced with a little link at the bottom that says “[Message clipped] Show entire message”
You and your team have spent time and energy designing, coding, and writing this email for your audience, and now they may not see everything. And that sucks.
Worse, if your unsubscribe link is cut off and subscribers can't find it, they're more likely to click the spam button. As with email deliverability, it's worth putting in a little extra work to ensure subscribers can experience your full message.
What triggers Gmail email truncation?
The Email Geek community has done a great job sharing information on this topic over the past few years. We found that there are two things that trigger your Gmail account to be truncated: HTML size and non-ASCII characters.
The first is pretty well known: If your email's HTML is larger than about 102 KB, Gmail will truncate it. After analyzing over 6,000 emails, I found that 5.5% were over 102KB in size! The exact size when Gmail decides to clip your emails isn't entirely consistent. Sometimes truncation occurs with emails that are smaller. Additionally, if your ESP changes your code, such as when it inserts tracking links, the size of your HTML will increase. So a good rule of thumb is to try to stay under 80KB.
It's worth noting that 100KB is probably the intended limit. In fact, AMP for email has a documented limit of 100KB.
The second is less well known and less common – non-ASCII characters. Some important context: ASCII and UTF-8 are character encoding standards, the underlying way computers understand text. UTF-8 contains any special characters you want to use, such as: B. the copyright symbol (©) or accented characters (é), while ASCII contains a much more limited set. If your ESP doesn't encode your emails with UTF-8, you'll likely encounter this issue when you use special characters.
How to fix email clipping in Gmail?
The first step to avoid Gmail email truncation is to test, test, test! It's always a good idea to send a live version to your inbox and also use an email preview service. Two great tools to help you do this are Parcel and Email on Acid. After all, there's no point in fixing this problem if it doesn't exist!
If your test encounters Gmail email clipping, try these three steps:
1. Use an HTML minifier
An HTML minifier removes comments, spaces, and really anything else that isn't related to the content of the email itself. Make sure you use a comment created for emails so you don't accidentally remove conditional MSO comments! Parcel has a built-in minifier to help you with exactly this problem!
2. Remove bloated code
If your email still exceeds the 102KB limit and is getting truncated even after using a minifier, it's probably time to take a look at your template. Does it have a lot of code compared to the content? It might be time to think about modernizing your template. Good Email Code by Mark Robbins has many good snippets that are accessible, render well, and are extremely lightweight.
3. Encode your special characters
Finally, if your email is well under the 102KB limit, encode your special characters into HTML entities. There are plenty of tools online that can help you do this with the click of a button.
Happy sending!
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Author: Avi Goldman – Parcel
Email developer Avi Goldman is the founder and developer of Parcel, an editor that streamlines the email development workflow and helps you quickly code high-quality campaigns. Learn more at UseParcel.com.
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