Why is my email clipped in Gmail? The 102 KB fix

"[Message clipped] View entire message." If that line shows up under your newsletter, Gmail decided the email was too heavy to display in full and cut it off. The trigger is size, nothing else. So if you are wondering why your email is clipped in Gmail, the answer is a single number: 102 KB of raw HTML. Cross it and Gmail hides the rest of the message, footer included, behind a link most subscribers will never click.

The fix is not writing shorter newsletters. Among the emails we pull apart at Newsletrix, the heaviest messages are rarely the wordiest ones. They are the ones whose templates wrap every paragraph in three nested tables. This guide covers where the limit sits, what it quietly breaks, and how to get back under it without touching your copy.

Why Gmail clips your email at 102 KB

Gmail truncates any message whose HTML body goes past roughly 102 KB. Google has never published the threshold, but the help docs of Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Brevo all converge on the same figure. Everything past the cut is replaced with "[Message clipped]" and a "View entire message" link that opens the full email in a new window.

Two details in that sentence do the damage. The limit counts raw HTML, the source code of the message, not what the reader sees. And it counts the encoded version that travels over SMTP. Most email is sent quoted-printable, an encoding that wraps lines at 76 characters and turns every non-ASCII character into escape sequences: a single curly apostrophe becomes =E2=80=99, nine bytes for one character. An HTML file that exports at 95 KB from your editor can cross 102 KB on the wire. If your template is anywhere near the line, assume you are over it.

Images, for once, are innocent. A 2 MB hero photo is hosted on a CDN and referenced by a URL, so it adds a hundred bytes of link, not two megabytes of weight. The exception is base64-embedded images, which live inside the HTML and count in full. Almost nobody embeds images on purpose. Check anyway.

The weight is in your template, not your words

We pulled the raw MIME source of the six most recent newsletters that landed in one of our Newsletrix tracking inboxes. The heaviest weighed 105.6 KB of HTML, already past Gmail's limit, and carried 685 words of copy. The wordiest of the six packed 1,043 words into 67.5 KB. The email that got clipped was one of the shortest reads in the batch.

Do the arithmetic on that clipped message and it gets uncomfortable. 685 words of plain text is under 5 KB. The other 100 KB, more than 95% of the email, was markup: layout tables, inline styles, tracking parameters and Outlook compatibility code. The subscriber saw a short newsletter. Gmail saw a heavy one.

This is why we think cutting copy is the wrong first move, even though it is the first thing most senders try. Trimming 200 words saves maybe 1.5 KB. Deleting one redundant template block can save ten times that. Your writing is the cheapest thing in the message. Cut markup first.

What clipping costs you

The obvious cost is that your ending disappears. Whatever sits below the cut, the final CTA, the referral ask, the sponsor's second placement, renders as a link nobody clicks.

The hidden costs are worse. Your unsubscribe link lives in the footer, which is the first thing the clip swallows. A subscriber who wants out and cannot find the exit does not shrug and move on, they hit the spam button, which sits right at the top of the Gmail window. Complaints feed the sender reputation that decides whether your next send reaches the inbox at all; if that number is already wobbly, read our diagnostic on why newsletter emails go to spam. The header-level one-click unsubscribe that Gmail's bulk sender rules require keeps working, because it lives in the message headers, not the body. It is a safety net, not an excuse.

And your open rate lies to you. Most platforms drop the tracking pixel at the very bottom of the body, past the clip, where Gmail never loads it. Klaviyo's own help doc warns about exactly this. Subscribers read the email, the pixel never fires, and your dashboard reports a dip that did not happen. If you run resend-to-non-opener automations, those "non-openers" now include people who read the whole thing.

There is a newer cost, too. Gmail's snippet line, and the AI features that now summarize and triage inboxes, work from the message content. Clip the message and they work from half of it.

Drag-and-drop builders against markdown-first platforms

Where the weight comes from depends on the tool that built the email. Visual block editors, the kind Mailchimp and Klaviyo are known for, assemble each block as its own nest of tables with inline CSS repeated on every cell, plus conditional comments so Outlook does not mangle the layout. Every block pays that tax again. Twenty blocks in, the markup outweighs the words twenty to one, which is exactly the ratio we measured in the clipped email above.

Markdown-first platforms like Substack, beehiiv and Kit generate their HTML from plain text, so the same word count comes out several times lighter. They carry their own baggage, mostly tracking wrappers and web fonts, but they rarely clip on an ordinary issue. For what it is worth, three of the six emails in our sample came through Brevo at between 50 and 64 KB each, comfortably under the limit.

Curious what a competitor sends with? Our ESP detector reads the fingerprints in their headers, and our breakdown of the most popular ESPs for newsletters covers what each platform choice implies for template weight.

How to check your email's size before Gmail clips it

Send the next campaign to your own Gmail address first. Open it, click the three-dot menu, choose Show original, and download the .eml file. That file is what Gmail weighs. If the HTML part is over 102 KB, you are clipped. If it is over 85 KB, you are one sponsor logo away from it. We treat 85 KB as the working budget because quoted-printable overhead eats the margin.

Rendering suites like Litmus will screenshot your email across forty clients, and if you are weighing that kind of tool against send monitoring, we wrote up how Newsletrix compares to Litmus. For the size question alone you do not need any of it. The .eml download is free and takes a minute.

How to get under 102 KB without cutting copy

Work down this list in order; the top items pay the most.

• Strip unused CSS. Template editors ship style rules for every block type you might use, including the ones you did not. Exported templates often carry more style sheet than content.
• Flatten the layout. A one-column text section does not need a three-table scaffold.
• Deduplicate Outlook conditionals. Builders repeat the same MSO fallback markup per block when once per message would do.
• Delete the preheader padding hack if your template repeats ‌ and   entities hundreds of times to push preview text out of view. That trick alone can run several KB.
• Keep images referenced rather than base64-embedded, and watch tracking parameters: sixty links with 200-character UTM tails is 12 KB of pure query string.

And if you catch a typo after sending, resist the corrected resend with the same subject line. Gmail threads messages that share a subject, and the stacked conversation makes clipping more likely on the second try, not less.

What not to do

Do not start by shortening the newsletter. Length and weight are cousins, not twins. We cover the length question separately in how long should a newsletter be, and the honest answer there has nothing to do with Gmail's limit; a 2,000-word issue from a lean template sails under 102 KB. If engagement is the worry, your image-to-text ratio is a better lever than word count.

Do not strip the footer to save weight. The unsubscribe link, postal address and permission reminder are compliance furniture, and they protect your complaint rate. Shave the decorative parts of the footer if you must. Keep the legal ones.

The genuinely debatable cut is compatibility code. Dark-mode media queries and Outlook conditional comments are often the largest honest blocks in a template, and deleting them can claw back 10 KB or more. The tradeoff is real: kill the MSO comments and your layout can fall apart for Outlook desktop readers; kill the dark-mode rules and Gmail on iOS may invert your brand colors into mud. Check your audience split before you decide. A B2C list light on Outlook can usually afford it. A B2B list usually cannot.

Frequently asked questions

What size does Gmail clip emails at?

Gmail clips messages whose HTML body exceeds roughly 102 KB. Google has not documented the threshold, but help docs from Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Brevo all converge on the same number. The limit applies to the raw encoded HTML source, so quoted-printable overhead counts against it.

Does image size count toward the 102 KB limit?

No. Images in email are hosted on a server and referenced by URL, so a 2 MB photo adds only the length of its link. The exception is base64-embedded images, which sit inside the HTML itself and count in full. Long tracking URLs also add up when a template carries dozens of them.

Does Gmail clipping affect open rates?

It affects reported open rates. Most platforms place the open-tracking pixel at the bottom of the message, and Gmail does not load anything past the clip until the reader clicks View entire message. Subscribers still receive and read the email, but a share of those opens never gets recorded.

How do I check my email's HTML size?

Send the campaign to your own Gmail address, open it, choose Show original from the three-dot menu, and download the message. The size of the HTML part is your real weight. Checking the exported HTML file from your editor also works, but leave headroom for encoding, which can push a 90 KB file past 102 KB on the wire.

Which email platforms produce the largest HTML?

Drag-and-drop block editors produce the heaviest markup, because every block ships its own nested tables, inline styles and Outlook conditional comments. Markdown-first platforms like Substack, beehiiv and Kit generate leaner HTML from the same word count, so the same issue can weigh several times less there.

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