Gmail iOS Increases Email Font Sizes – Again

UPDATE 8/31/2016: The fix for issue has been updated.

Gmail is increasing font sizes on emails in their iOS app – again. Gmail first rolled out this change a month ago but rolled it back 3 days later. However, sad to say it looks like we’re going to have to deal with this once more. (Thanks Niven)

For more background, see: Gmail iOS App Increases Email Font Size and What You Can Do About It

This Time Around

I noticed this time that fewer emails appear to have their fonts resized and when it happens it often results in better readability. However, I still came across many emails that look broken from this change.

Here’s an example of a recent email from Logitech that is broken due to the font increase:

logitech

iOS as Testbed for Android?

Interestingly this feature still hasn’t made it to Gmail on Android. I’m thinking Google might be treating iOS users as beta testers since the number of people using Gmail on iOS is much smaller than Android as Gmail comes bundled on Android.

Gmail really should just bite the bullet and support media queries just like the iOS and Android email clients. That way, designers can decide on the best font size for viewers on mobile and desktop clients.

Fix

If your design looks broken, you might want to alter it to accommodate Gmail’s changes. However, if you’re short on time this fix appears to prevent Gmail from resizing your fonts.


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Latest Comments
  1. Ira Brickman

    Again! This is really messing up my emails. Any thoughts on the white-on-white impacting spam scores? If I change to a 0px font size would that be better?

    • Justin

      Setting font size to 0px would cause the technique to not work since it depends on the text to “lock” the width of the email. Spam filters take in a number of attributes to determine if an email is spam or not and as long as your email is not borderline spam this technique would not tip the scales. However, nothing beats testing :)

  2. Melinda

    Hi Justin,
    This fix works great for Gmail iOS, but not so well on Gmail Android . . . the header still displays a little funky. Any ideas?

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