102KB ought to be enough for any email – Terence Eden’s Blog

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Another day, another Gmail bug which won't get fixed.

The original Android phone - HTC Dream - had 192MB of RAM. The latest Android phones tend to have 6GB. A 32 times increase in a decade. Laptops have also leapt forwards in speed and memory. Sadly, no one on the Gmail team has noticed.

It's 2019, and Gmail app users are still seeing the dreaded "[Message Clipped] View entire message" error.

It's just as bad on the web version of Gmail - even on Desktop Chrome.

Google don't even do fancy AI magic to truncate these messages. You'd think they'd truncate at the end of a word. Or even in the middle of a word. They don't.

Nope, just slam straight through that HTML. YOLO!

What causes this? For unknown reasons, Gmail truncates messages at 102KB. That's about half the storage space of a floppy disk.

I'm talking 🖬, not 💾!

This is annoying for people sending newsletters - even the mighty MailChimp can do no more than offer some tips to shrink your latest newsletter.

Worse still, marketing emails know that if they pad out their messages, they can hide the unsubscribe link!

Oh, and as a bonus, if you click on "View entire message" - you get the old version of Gmail and Google's logo.

Google updated their logo in 2015. You'd think in the last four years, someone on the Gmail team would have received a long email and then filed a bug report. But no.

We can argue about whether emails should be chonkie-bois or not. But they are. People want full styling, images, and fancy features - not just ASCII text and the occasional uuencoded attachment. That's the world we're in now.

What can be done? There's literally no point me taking this up with Google. People have been complaining about this for over a decade and nothing has been done to fix it.

"User-focussed" my shiny metal arse.

So, here's a whinging blog post which - if I'm very lucky - won't make Google lock me out of my account again.

Bill Gates probably didn't say 640KB ought to be enough for anyone - but someone in the bowels of Google sure as hell believes 102KB ought to be enough for any email.

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12 thoughts on “102KB ought to be enough for any email”

Felipe Lavín

I think the real issue here it’s that even in 2019 we need to resort to tables and inline styles for most kinds of layout and visual appearance, which can explain most of the weight… If we had decent standards support and reliable CSS styling, then 102 kB would surely be enough for most messages

Reply 2019-05-29 14:27

Andrew McGlashan

Put the content behind a link and share the link in the email. I agree that 102KB is very small these days, but with faster Internet connections it won't be long before people start sending really large files and think nothing of it.

We do have https://send.firefox.com and other easy services to securely send large files to others. Gone are the times when an ordinary email message could be well contained in plain old text (NO HTML), I gave up on doing just text emails some time ago, but still.... the transport for SMTP is textual after all, as too is HTML, but with emails sending you to a server, it would save the payload on email systems with all the copies being sent everywhere whilst some may never even get opened, ever! The bits are there, don't waste them 😉

Reply 2019-05-29 14:39

@edent

That's not a good idea. We have plenty of storage and bandwidth. If you put content behind a link, you make it harder to read and search.

Reply 2019-05-29 14:51

Šime Vidas

make email crap

introduce AMP Email

???

profit

(joke)

Reply 2019-05-29 15:10

mike

That you say joke makes me wonder if you know that AMP for Email is a real thing. I don't know if anyone's using it yet, but it exists. Like Google set out to produce something that could be the answer to both "What's a worse idea than AMP?" and "What's a worse idea than HTML email?"

Reply 2019-05-29 20:28

Šime Vidas

Yes, it’s a real thing. Pinterest and Google Docs are using it. The joke clarification is about me not wanting to suggest that Gmail is intentionally making email crap.

Reply 2019-05-29 20:39

mike

AMP Email + Pinterest = 🤮

Reply 2019-05-29 20:49

Daryl

Careful, the big G is listening ... they just might make AMP Email a thing and monopolize through that too

Reply 2019-05-30 10:35

Steven Hollingsworth

There appears to me to be something utterly new going on with [Message clipped] that no one is talking about yet because the 102K limit is already too intrusive, but now it appears that messages may be being clipped to a far tighter limit for senders that Google in...