Why Gmail Always Cuts Off Your Favorite Newsletter

Popular email clients, particularly Gmail, have a tendency to cut emails off after a 102-kilobyte limit. Why the heck is that—and whose fault is it, anyway?

There are a handful of things I love — writing long articles, telling bad jokes, and obsessing over random bits of code.

This is probably why I run an email newsletter, which is about a week away from hitting its sixth anniversary.

But as a newsletter writer who reads other newsletters, I notice things, and one of the things I noticed recently involved Platformer, a tech newsletter by former Verge journalist Casey Newton. Newton’s newsletter had a lot of good stuff in it, but Gmail had a problem with its length, and forced the newsletter to jump only halfway through … something that doesn’t happen very often to this newsletter, which is about as long as Casey’s.

What gives? It turns out that is something of a “dark art” of email marketing that isn’t properly described to regular folks, even though it directly affects them and makes their lives a little harder. (And I know there’s interest because I tweeted about why I thought there was a “jump,” and people actually seemed interested.)