Gmail's 102 KB clip limit: what is known and how to stay under it

Gmail cuts off an email and shows a "View entire message" link when its HTML passes about 102 KB. Google does not publish that number. Litmus, Mailchimp and Klaviyo all cite it, and developer tests found clipping near 100 KB. Only code counts, not images. Stay under 80 KB.

For scale, here is every template in our library as the editor exports it, split into what fills it. Inline style attributes are the largest part of each one.

What Google documents and what testers observed

Google has not published a threshold (Suped), and its Gmail CSS documentation does not mention clipping. 102 KB is an observed line.

Testers on the email-bugs thread also saw mail clipped well below the line, and some far above it that was not. Leave margin: treat 100,000 bytes as a ceiling and aim for 80 KB, since tools disagree on whether a kilobyte is 1,000 or 1,024 bytes.

What counts toward the limit

• Source code, not images. Klaviyo counts text, styling, links and other markup. Image files do not count; the code that displays them does.
• The HTML Gmail receives. Your platform's wrappers and rewritten tracking links add to your draft, and personalization scripting can leave blank lines behind.
• Special characters. Email on Acid reports that non-ASCII characters can trigger clipping when a platform does not encode in UTF-8. A tester saw an unencoded copyright sign do it in 2019, and a 2026 retest found it no longer did. Declare UTF-8 and write symbols as entities anyway.

What clipping hides

Everything after the cut waits behind the link: the footer, the unsubscribe link and any call to action near the end. Mailchimp says its open tracking is clipped too. Google requires bulk marketing mail to carry a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the body, and Email on Acid warns that people who cannot find one are more likely to press the spam button.

How to cut the size

• Host every image and drop inline SVG. Gmail supports neither base64 images nor embedded SVG, and base64 makes data about a third larger.
• Repeat less inline CSS. A 120-character style on 200 cells is 24,000 characters. Repeated rules can move into a head style block, but Gmail caps that tag at 16 KB on desktop, and in one test the tag that crossed the limit was dropped whole. Keep layout-critical styles inline.
• Strip what is dead. Comments, old client fixes, needless nested tables and markup your platform adds.
• Minify with care. Use a minifier that keeps the MSO conditional comments Outlook needs, then diff and render-test the output. In html-minifier-terser, whitespace collapsing is off until you turn it on.

import { minify } from "html-minifier-terser";

const smaller = await minify(html, {
  collapseWhitespace: true,
  conservativeCollapse: true, // keep one space so inline elements do not fuse
});

How to measure it

Measure the HTML your platform sends. Paste it into the email size checker, which counts the bytes, warns at 80 KB and flags 102 KB, and send a test to a Gmail address to look for the clipped notice. For templates built to stay light, see email design and the template library.