How does Gmail email clipping affect email deliverability and open rates?
Matthew Whittaker
Co-founder & CTO, Suped
Published 5 Aug 2025
Updated 16 Aug 2025
8 min read
Email clipping is a common issue that many senders encounter, particularly with Gmail. It happens when an email's size exceeds a certain limit, causing Gmail to truncate the message and hide the remaining content behind a "View entire message" link. While it might seem like a minor formatting glitch, email clipping can have significant repercussions for your email deliverability and your ability to accurately track engagement metrics like open rates.
I often see marketers struggling to understand why their emails aren't performing as expected, only to discover that clipping is the culprit. It's frustrating to craft a compelling message, only to have a significant portion of it hidden from your recipients.
Understanding why clipping occurs and its various impacts is crucial for maintaining a healthy email program and ensuring your messages reach their full potential. Let's delve into the mechanics of Gmail clipping and explore how it influences your email performance.
Why Gmail clips emails
The primary reason Gmail clips emails is due to a size limitation. If your email's HTML code exceeds 102 kilobytes (KB), Gmail will cut it off. This isn't just about the visible content, but the entire underlying HTML structure, including styling, images (though not the image files themselves, but their HTML references), and tracking pixels. Excessively complex or poorly coded templates are common culprits for exceeding this limit.
This limit is in place for a few reasons, including faster loading times and a smoother user experience, especially on mobile devices. However, it poses a challenge for senders who include rich content, multiple images, or intricate layouts. Email service providers (ESPs) can sometimes inject additional, sometimes redundant, code into your email, further increasing its size.
I've seen many cases where a perfectly good email design gets bloated by the ESP's coding practices, pushing it over the 102KB threshold. It's important to monitor the final HTML size of your emails, not just rely on what you see in the editor.
Understanding this size constraint is the first step in preventing clipping and ensuring your messages appear as intended in the inbox.
Clipping's effect on open rates
One of the most immediate and quantifiable impacts of email clipping is on your open rates. Most email tracking systems rely on a small, invisible tracking pixel embedded in the email's HTML. This pixel loads when the email is opened, registering an open event. However, if your email is clipped, and this tracking pixel is located at the bottom of the email (which is common), it might not load until the recipient clicks "View entire message."
This leads to artificially low open rates, making it difficult to accurately assess campaign performance. You might have more recipients engaging with your emails than your metrics suggest, but the clipped content prevents this from being recorded. As noted by a HubSpot community discussion, if the email gets cut off, so does the tracking pixel.
Furthermore, if your email's call to action (CTA) or crucial information is hidden, recipients are less likely to click. Even if they open the email, the extra step of clicking "View entire message" adds friction, which can negatively impact click-through rates (CTR) and overall campaign ROI.
It's not just about vanity metrics. Misleading open rates can cause you to misinterpret audience engagement, leading to poor strategic decisions for future campaigns. This is why having accurate data is so critical for optimizing your email strategy.
Deliverability and user experience
While clipping doesn't directly cause your emails to land in the spam folder, it has an indirect yet significant impact on email deliverability. Deliverability is heavily influenced by recipient engagement and sender reputation. When emails are clipped, it can lead to a degraded user experience, which in turn affects engagement.
Consider the unsubscribe link. Many legitimate emails place this link in the footer. If the email is clipped, this link becomes hidden. Recipients who want to opt out but can't find the unsubscribe option are more likely to mark your email as spam. A rise in spam complaints sends a negative signal to Gmail's algorithms, hurting your sender reputation and increasing the likelihood of future emails being sent to the spam folder or even getting your domain blocklisted (or blacklisted).
Beyond spam complaints, a clipped email can lead to lower engagement metrics overall. Fewer clicks, less time spent viewing the email, and a higher delete rate without opening (due to poor first impressions) can all signal to Gmail that your content isn't valuable to recipients. Gmail's filtering heavily relies on user interactions, so a lack of engagement, even if unintentional due to clipping, can negatively affect your inbox placement. This is directly related to whether exceeding email size limits impacts overall deliverability and sender reputation.
Strategies to avoid clipping
The most effective way to prevent email clipping is to keep your email's HTML size below 102KB. This requires a focus on efficient coding and design practices. Here are some strategies:
Minimize HTML code: Avoid unnecessary nesting, inline styles where external CSS could be used (though Gmail has its own CSS rendering quirks), and redundant tags.
Optimize images: While image files don't contribute to the HTML size, their references and surrounding code can. Ensure images are properly sized and compressed on your server to load quickly and avoid excessive code. Learn more about how images affect deliverability.
Remove hidden content: Some ESPs or template builders may leave hidden text or comments in the code. Clean these out.
Simplify design: A cleaner, more minimalist email design often results in smaller file sizes. This also applies to the use of GIFs and other media.
Test thoroughly: Always send test emails to Gmail accounts and check for clipping. There are also tools available that can show you the size of your email's HTML.
To ensure your tracking pixel loads, some senders strategically place it higher in the email code. For critical links like unsubscribe options, it's a good practice to include a prominent link early in the email, perhaps in the header, in addition to the footer. This provides an alternative for recipients if the footer gets clipped.
Remember, the goal is to make it easy for your recipients to interact with your email positively, whether that's clicking a CTA or unsubscribing. Any friction can lead to a negative experience and potentially impact your sender reputation, which ultimately affects your deliverability to the inbox.
Best practice for email size
Keep your email's HTML size below Gmail's 102KB limit to avoid clipping and ensure full content display. This improves the recipient's experience and helps with accurate tracking.
Using an email deliverability tester
Regularly test your email campaigns across various email clients and devices. Use an email deliverability tester to preview how your emails appear and identify any clipping issues before sending to your audience.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Actively monitor your email's HTML size before sending to stay within Gmail's 102KB limit, using tools to check the rendered code size.
Always include a prominent unsubscribe link at the top of your email or in the email header to ensure it's visible even if the message clips.
Optimize email templates by removing redundant HTML, inline styles, and hidden comments to reduce overall file size.
Test emails on various devices and email clients, especially Gmail, to manually check for clipping and user experience issues.
Implement the List-Unsubscribe header in your emails to provide an easy, one-click unsubscribe option directly from the Gmail interface.
Common pitfalls
Over-reliance on complex email templates from ESPs that might inject bloated, unnecessary code.
Ignoring the HTML file size during email creation, leading to unexpected clipping in the recipient's inbox.
Placing critical elements, like the unsubscribe link or primary call-to-action, only at the very bottom of the email.
Not considering how image-heavy emails or excessive GIFs can increase the overall HTML size due to their embed code.
Failing to regularly test clipped emails for the visibility of tracking pixels, leading to inaccurate open rate data.
Expert tips
If your open rates suddenly drop, check for email clipping first. It's a common cause.
Moving your open-tracking pixel higher in the email code can help ensure opens are tracked even if the email clips.
While Gmail's unsubscribe feature helps, don't neglect a clearly visible in-email unsubscribe link for all users.
Focus on clean, lean HTML. Every unnecessary tag or style contributes to the clipping threshold.
Consider a simple, text-based version as a fallback for clipped emails to ensure core message delivery.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says: If users try to unsubscribe and can't find the link due to clipping, they are likely to mark the email as spam, which negatively impacts deliverability.
2021-05-17 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says: A clipped email often results in the image that loads to track an open also being clipped, leading to inaccurate open rate reporting.
2021-05-17 - Email Geeks
Ensuring full message delivery
Email clipping by Gmail, driven by its 102KB size limit, significantly impacts how your campaigns perform. It can lead to inaccurate open rate metrics because tracking pixels may not load, and it can indirectly harm your email deliverability by increasing spam complaints if crucial links like the unsubscribe option are hidden. The result is a poorer user experience and diminished campaign effectiveness.
To counteract clipping, focus on lean email design, optimize your HTML, and ensure important calls to action and unsubscribe links are always visible, regardless of the clipping status. Regularly test your emails to catch potential issues before they affect your audience.
By proactively managing your email size and design, you can ensure your messages are fully delivered, accurately tracked, and provide the best possible experience for your recipients, ultimately safeguarding your sender reputation and maximizing your email marketing ROI.
