Why Gmail Clips Your Emails, and How Design Can Avoid It
102KB is the number every email designer should know. Here's what it means and how to stay under it.
October 2026
By The Qivox team
If you’ve ever opened your own newsletter in Gmail and found it ends with “[Message clipped] View entire message”, you’ve met Gmail clipping. Gmail clips emails when the message goes over about 102KB, and everything below the cut is hidden behind that link. Most readers never tap it. The good news is that the causes are mostly design decisions: how long the email is, how many different sections it uses, and how it’s put together in your email platform. Which means design can avoid them.
What Gmail clipping is
Gmail measures the size of the email itself: the HTML that holds the text, the layout and the styling. If that goes over roughly 102KB, Gmail shows the first part and replaces the rest with a link. Images don’t count towards the limit, because they’re loaded separately from the web. A newsletter can have twenty photos and stay comfortably small, or have no photos at all and still get clipped.
102KB sounds like a lot for an email. But every section, column, colour, spacing rule and link adds a little weight, and a long campaign made of many one-off sections adds up faster than you’d expect.
Why it matters more than it looks
The problem isn’t just that the end of the email is hidden. It’s what tends to live at the end.
Your footer disappears: Your address, legal text and contact details usually sit at the very bottom, below the cut.
So does the unsubscribe link: If people can’t find a quick way out, some will mark the email as spam instead, which is worse for everyone.
Your later content goes unseen: The second product, the event details or the closing offer may never be read.
Open figures can drop: Many platforms count opens with a tiny invisible image near the end of the email. If that part is clipped, some opens may not be recorded.
It looks unfinished: A clipped message reads as broken, which isn’t the impression you want to leave in a customer’s inbox.
Design decisions that keep emails light
Avoiding Gmail clipping usually starts long before anyone checks a file size. It starts with what goes into the email and how the template is planned.
One main message: The best fix is editorial. One main story and a couple of supporting items, then a link to the full article or the shop. Shorter emails are easier to read as well as lighter.
A small set of reusable sections: A template with six to eight well-designed sections, reused in every campaign, stays lighter than an email where every block is a brand new layout. It’s also quicker to put together each time.
Layout tricks where they earn their place: Multi-column grids, layered backgrounds and lots of decorative dividers all add weight. Use them for the moments that matter, not on every row.
Product grids with limits: Twelve products with prices, ratings and buttons is a lot of email. Four to six, with a clear link to see the rest, usually reads better and keeps the size down.
Text pasted in cleanly: Copying text straight from a word processor can bring hidden formatting with it. Paste as plain text, then style it in your email editor.
Images don’t count towards the 102KB limit. The length and complexity of the email do.
Check the size before you send
Most email platforms and testing tools show the size of the message. Check it on every campaign, not just the first one, because emails tend to grow over time as sections get added and never removed. Aim well under the limit rather than just under it. Links are often rewritten for tracking when the email is sent, which adds weight you won’t see in the editor.
Then send a test to a Gmail address, open it on your phone and scroll to the very bottom. If you can see your footer and your unsubscribe link, you’re fine. If you see “[Message clipped]”, look at what can come out before you look at anything else.
Common mistakes that lead to clipping
A few patterns come up again and again. A monthly round-up that tries to include everything from the past four weeks. A whole blog post pasted into the email instead of an introduction and a link. A template that’s been copied and adjusted so many times that it carries old, hidden sections nobody uses. And a long run of product blocks that each look slightly different, so none of them can share styling.
Each of these is a design and content decision before it’s a technical one. Trimming them makes the email shorter, clearer and easier to scan, as well as safer from clipping. For more on keeping emails focused, our email design best practices cover hierarchy and calls to action, and our guide to emails that work with images off explains how to keep your message visible in every inbox.
Lighter emails start with the template
Clipping is much easier to avoid when the template is designed from the start with a limited, reusable set of sections and a clear sense of how long an email should be. That’s part of how we approach email template design: fewer, better sections that your team can combine for each campaign without the email quietly growing.
Getting clipped already, or not sure? Send us a recent campaign for a free email design review.
