When you send an email to Gmail, sometimes they will hide the full content behind a "[Message clipped] View entire message" notification. This will look as the image below;
This behavior could cause the following undesired behaviors:
1. SendGrid's users could have spent time and energy designing this email for an audience, and they might not see the complete email. Additionally, if your email gets clipped, users might not see the unsubscribe links. When readers can not find the unsubscribe links, they are more likely to hit the spam button. Therefore, hurting your reputation.
2. It interferes with the way that SendGrid tracks opens. Since the message is clipped, the pixel added at the end of the email to record opens is not loaded unless the recipient clicks on the "View entire message" link.
What triggers email clipping in Gmail?
Size of email: If your email’s HTML content is larger than 102KB, Gmail will generally clip the message.
Non-ASCII characters: When using non-ASCII characters such as the copyright symbol (©) or special characters usually found in different languages (é, Æ, Ø, ñ) in your HTML, Gmail may clip your message due to character encoding.
How to prevent clipping
1. Remove unnecessary content and try to design your email so its size is less than 102 KB.
To check the size of your email, send it to a test address. Then download the email and check its properties.
2. In addition to file size, Gmail will clip and thread messages sent with identical subject lines.
If you are sending out tests of your emails to confirm they look how you like, they will most likely be sent with the same message. When the same message is sent multiple times, Gmail will thread them into a single chain for the sake of convenience. The good news is that while you might receive multiple copies of the email in testing, leads will only get it once. As such, the chances of your message getting clipped in their inboxes are not high.
3. If you want to use special characters (é, Æ, Ø, ñ) and avoid being clipped by Gmail. You can use HTML entities. An HTML entity is a piece of text ("string") that begins with an ampersand (&) and ends with a semicolon (;). Entities are frequently used to display reserved characters and invisible characters (like non-breaking spaces).
For example, let's say you want to send this message in your email: Hello from Twilio SendGrid ©
The HTML entity for the copyright symbol © is ©. Therefore, you should send your email like this:Hello from Twilio SendGrid ©
The code © will get changed to ©
Always ensure to test your email to various inbox providers before mass sending, for this you can use our Email testing feature and perform an Inbox Rendering Test.