Gmail is trimming html email content. How to avoid the issue?

Question

Gmail introduced a trimming feature in emails for "better readability". This causes a lot of pain for me, as I have a notification system for email, where I send some html email messages to users. Basically email looks like this:

divs and styling
Object alert in Project by User
tables and tr/td
User Action on Object in Project
/tables and tr/td
/divs and styling

link
footer

To group all emails in one conversation, first email has subject, subsequent emails have Re: subject.

Active users can receive significant amounts of emails like this, but due to "better readability" feature, ALL of the email content (starting from second email) is suppressed.

I am looking for advice - maybe I should redesign my html, or gmail has some anti-suppression code, or just a hack to go around this issue.

Issue from users perspective is described here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=756b83fa60ca1df7&hl=en

Answer 1

I had the trimming problem occurring on a table of an HTML newsletter. It was very important that the entire table display because it was the #1 content our client wanted to communicate. Here's the fix, or at least here's how we solved our problem. We eliminated any repetition. So for this table, the lines in between each row, Gmail was seeing the lines as repetitive. So I altered the pixel width by 1 px every other line, which eliminated the repetition and fixed our problem. So that said, look for repetition, and try to remove it. OR in some cases, you might have to add type (in white) to create the variation.

Source.

PS: This is a bit unrelated, but I stumbled upon this question while looking for a way to disable the content trimming and keep the conversation view at the same time. I didn't find anything, so I developed a small extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Answer 2

It turns out that there is a very simple rule which causes this behaviour: Gmail will clip the email as soon as it sees the sender (From:) name in the body of the message, regardless of where this appears.

Solution: make sure that that the From: name in your email is not used in the message body (except in the signature, which will probably get clipped!).

Answer 3

This is an awful bug in Gmail, if you're unlucky enough to get bitten by it.

In my case, it was "trimming" an entire message, in a clean thread. See an example here, noting that the "trimmed" content is expanded in the screen-shot.

I ultimately worked around Gmail's bug by removing the entire header you see in that example ("Awesome Home Swap"), including the border below it. I stopped short of actually trying to figure out what specifically was making Gmail confuse that header as a "signature" (though I suspect it could have been the border, implemented using CSS directive border-bottom:1px dotted grey to style the <td> element).