Judi Sohn

Reinventing myself one crisis at a time.

Spaceless in Gmail

Heads up if you produce email newsletters…there’s a new bug in Gmail that is stripping out paragraph margins in HTML email. This only started happening earlier this week.

A colleague and I both noticed that C3’s Feedburner email subscriptions were suddenly coming in with no spacing between paragraphs.

In Gmail:

gmail.png

In Mail.app (and I assume other desktop email clients):

mail.png

A quick look using Firebug reveals the source of the problem:

firebug.png

Use Firebug to disable that style property and the problem is gone.

Thank you to a post on the NTEN Discuss email list for pointing out a thread on the Google Gmail support forums about this.

Due to a glitch with some formatting in Convio, I always have to code our e-newsletters in such a way that also serves as a workaround for this Gmail bug. You’ll need to style each paragraph tag with margins that will overrule the misplaced margin above. For example:

<p style="margin-bottom: 10px;">Text goes here</p>

Yes, it adds bulk to your email which isn’t good, but it also makes sure that the message will be legible in most clients. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about Feedburner email subscriptions, so I hope Google fixes this one quickly.

Judi Sohn

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3 responses to “Spaceless in Gmail”

  2. It’s stunning to me that Google either doesn’t care, or is having such a hard time fixing such a big, yet totally simple, problem. And it is a big problem — the paragraph, arguably the most basic structural unit of text markup, doesn’t work properly! It’s a single stupid line in the style sheet! Unbelievable.