Avoiding Email Clipping by Gmail

After launching an email campaign, you may sometimes observe that the entire length of the email message is not available in your Gmail inbox, but it is clipped. You can see the entire message if you click the [Message Clipped] View Entire Message link at the end of your email.

Clipped messages might not offer a smooth experience to the users. It might even discourage them from receiving messages from your brand. To avoid email clipping by Gmail, you can take some measures. 

This guide answers the following questions:

• When does Gmail clip your emails?
• How does email clipping impact user experience?
• How can you prevent clipping in your emails?

Let's first understand why an email is clipped.

When does Gmail clip your emails?

Gmail clips emails larger than 102KB and hides the full content behind the [Message Clipped] View Entire Message hyperlinked link.
If your pure email HTML template is close to the 75 KB threshold, you will see a notification on the Launch step of your email campaign. This means that your message will most likely be clipped in the users' inbox.

Campaign with one variant

 

Experiment campaign with two variants

 You can send a test message on the Launch step to yourself to check your email and see if it is clipped in your Gmail inbox. If it is clipped in the test email, it will also be clipped when you launch your email campaign.

How does email clipping impact user experience?

If your email messages keep getting clipped, you will likely see an increase in your spam reports. Your users will end up having a frustrating experience and want to change their opt-in preferences. They might also want to globally opt out from your campaigns. This might eventually decrease your users' interactivity and engagement.

How can you prevent clipping in your emails?

We strongly suggest you follow the measures below if you see clipping in your test messages or email campaigns.

• Shorten URL size: Shortening the URL sizes can help you reduce the size of your email messages. To enable the link shortener feature for your panel, you should create a ticket to Insider's Operational Excellence Team. This will shorten the link by about 40%. However, the data retention window is only 60 days from when the link is created. The clicks are not tracked if a short link is clicked outside of this window.
• Delete previous test emails: Gmail often combines emails with the same subject line into a single email in your inbox. If you send several test emails for the same campaign, your message might become so large that Gmail clips the test email. However, you can delete the previous test emails from your inbox for testing purposes and then send the test email again.
• Create emails from scratch: If you directly paste content from an outside source, you may add the formatting code hidden behind the pasted content to your campaign's code. To avoid such issues, we highly recommend creating your email templates from scratch using an HTML editor or Drag & Drop Editor.
• Disable Support for Outlook option: The "Support for Outlook" option alone is 1KB per button in the email. If your user base is not Outlook-focused, you can consider disabling this option to prevent your emails from being clipped.
  
• Clean your code: Remove unnecessary lines, excessive padding, and messy code to optimize your email's HTML structure.
• Use "Read More" links: We suggest adding “Read More” links for long content. This reduces email size while maintaining tracking data.
• Test your email size: Testing emails should be cleaned and optimized before sending to ensure the intended impact.

If the above options don't seem to help prevent clipping, it’s likely that your campaign just has a lot of content. Please remove some content in the containers, structures, and stripes, and also minimize the number of styles applied to email elements to reduce your email weight.