Why does Gmail cut off my newsletter?

Gmail sometimes cuts off emails. At the bottom of your newsletter, you will see a link directing to the full newsletter ('Show full email', or 'Message clipped'). This can happen in both the Gmail web versions, and the mobile versions for iPhone and Android.

Possible consequences

• The reason for cutting off your email is the size of its underlying code: this happens if the total size is over 115 kilobyte. (You should know that the size of images is not relevant to this number).
• Cutting off a newsletter also means that the last block, where people can unsubscribe, is not visible. This block contains the code that allows us to see if your newsletter has been opened. In this case, our application can only register that someone opened the email if they click to see the full newsletter.
• If you have selected content blocks to be invisible for mobile or desktop display, it is probable that these blocks are still shown when the newsletter is cut off. This is because the underlying code for this setting has been cut off too.
• Generally, newsletters made with our drag & drop editor are less than 115 kB. For example, all templates we offer stay well under this threshold. But if your newsletter consists of many blocks, the underlying code may surpass it.

Do you want to know the size of the newsletter you are currently working on? You can find this in Step 5, under the sample newsletter. For sent newsletters, you can find this on the page Campaigns (under Browse), when you click View for the relevant newsletter. All the way at the bottom of the page, you will see the size.

You cannot prevent a newsletter larger than 115 kB getting cut off. Is your newsletter larger than 115 kB, and you want your newsletter to be shown in its entirety in Gmail? You only have one option: to shorten the newsletter. With this, you can take into account the standard sizes of the block in your newsletter. For these, see the table below.

As an alternative, you can also send a shortened version to your Gmail subscribers. To do so, you have to create a segment for these subscribers. You can send the elaborate version to all other subscribers.

Finally: why do (some) blocks consist of so much code? We can imagine that you ask this question if you have experience in creating websites. The answer: email clients are much more volatile than webbrowsers; you need many more tricks (code) to get your newsletters displayed correctly in all email clients.

Overview of block sizes in newsletters

To get a good impression of the size of the blocks in your newsletter, we express the size in kilobytes. These are the standard blocks in a newsletter; when you fill and adjust them, the size will change (but not by much).