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Why Are My Emails Being Clipped By Gmail?
Why Are My Emails Being Clipped By Gmail?

Learn why your emails are being clipped by Gmail and what you can do about it.

Peter Connolly avatar
Written by Peter Connolly
Updated over 4 years ago

If in Gmail you see a message at the bottom of your email saying “[Message clipped] View entire message” it means that your email has been clipped.

Gmail will clip emails when the email file size is larger than 102KB.

Your email file size is made up by the underlying email code. This code contains all the text, URLs, tracking codes, HTML markup, links to where your images are hosted plus more. 

The more content in your email, the larger the file size will be. 

If your emails are being clipped, SmartrMail’s tracking code to measure opens will also be clipped. This means that people opening clipped emails will not be recorded as having opened your email in your SmartrMail dashboard. 

To ensure your open rate is accurate, it is important that your emails are not being clipped by Gmail. 

If this is happening to you, try the troubleshooting suggestions below.

Sending multiple test emails with different subject lines

If you are sending multiple test emails, it is possible that Gmail is clipping your email because Gmail often combines emails with the same subject line into a single email thread. 

To test whether this is the case, send yourself another test email of your campaign with a different subject line. Gmail will then treat this email as a separate email. 

If this email is not clipped, then your subscribers won't have the email clipped in their inboxes either. 

Pasting content into your email as plain text

Sometimes when you paste content from another source additional formatting code is pasted into the email along with it. Even though you can't see this code, it increases the overall file size of the email. 

To ensure you don't paste additional formatting code into your emails, you should add text as 'plain-text'. To do this, use the following keyboard shortcuts:

  • On PCs: Control+Shift+V

  • On Macs: Option+Shift+Command+V

If your email was being clipped, try deleting any text you've copied across and add it again in new blocks as plain text with the above shortcuts. 

Disable Google Analytics UTM tags 

By default, SmartrMail adds UTM tags to your links so that you can easily track your email campaigns in Google Analytics.

These UTM tags slightly increase your overall email file size. By disabling the tags you'll reduce the file size of your email and possibly prevent it from being clipped.

Reduce the amount of content in your email

If your email is still being clipped after trying the above solutions, then your email is simply too long. 

Try breaking up your message into separate emails or remove any content that is not needed. 

You can still send the email if the file size is over 102KB and your subscribers will still be able to see all the content by clicking on the "View entire message" link at the bottom. 

However if you opt to send emails that will be clipped, remember that your open rate will not accurately reflect the number of people reading your email. 

Image file sizes do not matter

When you add an image to your email, the image itself is hosted outside of the email. All that is added to the email code is a link to where the image is located. 

This means that reducing the file size of images before adding them to your email will not affect the overall file size of your email. 

Reducing the number of images you add to your email will however reduce the overall file size of your email.

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