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Inbox Innovation
Journal

20 October 2026

3 minute read

Douglas Baker

Why Gmail clips your email, and what it hides

Gmail cuts off messages over 102 KB. The part it hides is usually the part you are legally required to show.

Gmail truncates any email whose HTML is larger than 102 KB and replaces the rest with a “View entire message” link. Most readers never click it.

Think about what sits at the bottom of an email. The footer, the postal address, the preference centre and the unsubscribe link. An oversized email does not just look broken; it hides the one link your readers are entitled to, which makes the spam button the easiest way out.

It is rarely the images

Images are hosted elsewhere and do not count towards the limit. The weight is in the HTML itself:

  • Drag-and-drop builders that wrap every block in several layers of tables and repeat the same styles inline on every element.
  • Blocks copied between templates, each carrying its own copy of the same CSS.
  • Tracking parameters appended to dozens of links.
  • Hidden content for other languages or markets left in every send.

What good looks like

A well-built email with a hero, a few text blocks, a product pair and a full footer can sit well under 20 KB. The emails in our demo system are around 9 to 11 KB each, including Outlook and dark-mode code.

If your emails are near the limit, the fix is structural: shared components with lean, tested markup, rather than trimming one template at a time.

Check your email’s size and more

Get notes like this every two weeks

The Inbox Brief: what changed in email and what to do about it.

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How does your email really score?

Paste any email’s HTML. Get a scored report on rendering, dark mode, accessibility and deliverability. It runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Sample report, from the tool’s own sample email

42A meaningful share of the audience is seeing something nobody designed.

  • Rendering40
  • Dark mode25
  • Accessibility30
  • Deliverability38
  • Structure83

7 to fix · 8 to improve