James Lamb recently noticed an email being clipped in his Gmail inbox. Gmail notoriously truncates messages if the code exceeds ~102KB and adds a ‘view entire message’ link. Aside from being a bad user experience, this can also causes issues for emails in which the tracking pixel is at the bottom.
This email, though, was short in code.
Matt Vernhout mentioned that Gmail can be triggered by improperly closed HTML tags. Rémi Parmentier linked to a case where it’s caused by special characters. But it was Kait Creamer’s anecdote that was particularly interesting to me.
I had the same thing happen when I had Grammarly turned on in my ESP years ago—it added a bunch of hidden code to my email. Took me ages to figure out what was going on.
Paul J seconded the oddity:
I’ve had the same issue with Grammarly. A specialist viewing an email in my ESP had the Grammarly extension and it added a ton of code.
As I know well from diagnosing web app bugs, it’s always worth asking which browser extensions are being used — not only by the recipient in this case, but also the person creating the email. Next time your test sends are acting up, check that Grammarly isn’t getting in the way.
Update:
Grammarly’s Drew Price (who’s also behind 10 Billion Emails) let us know that a late-2018 update to their browser extension should fix or reduce the bug described above. He also pointed out that the extension isn’t necessarily optimised for HTML editors. The best course of action is to disable Grammarly on any domain with which you’re noticing issues (i.e. your ESP’s website).