How to Work Around Maximum Size Limit for Emails

Introduction

A long-standing client, a financial site that deals with the latest financial news from across the world had an unusual problem. They had trouble sending emails that had a lot of content. A leading player in the financial news space in the US, they give the latest stock market news. They offer live web-based streaming news delivered via a JavaScript live feed application.

Challenge

The client has a large volume of content namely stock market news for different companies. The client site is integrated with multiple third-party systems where real-time news articles are aggregated via custom API integrations. The information thus received is sent as the content of the bulk subscription emails for the different users real-time, daily, and weekly. The issue or the problem was with the emails sent to users who are subscribed to a watch-list. A watch-list is a set of companies that the user is interested in so that emails will be sent in constant intervals (daily or weekly) with the news of these companies. These watch-list emails could contain hundreds of content titles and other data. But the issue was Gmail clip’s emails that have size in excess of 102 Kb.

Read how we improved the speed of the processing and sending of the personalized emails.

Solution Provided

We analyzed the problem and found some points where we could reduce the size of the email. The email didn’t contain any image, so we could not reduce the size of the email that way. But the email usually contains a lot of links which are linked to the main site. The email primarily contains 4 tables which show the calendar data and different sections like content from the parent site, subsite, press release etc. Each section contains title of a number of links.

Following are the different solutions put forward:

• Instead of using the alias URL (which is usually a custom URL created from the document title), used a short URL in article link, which reduced a lot of characters.
• Trim the title of the articles shown to a specified number of characters.
• Removed unwanted CSS styles.
• Used a minified HTML template by removing white spaces, newlines etc.
• Removed unwanted spacing between styles.
• Removed closing tags from HTML tags which don't always need to be closed.

The Result

The subscription emails now can incorporate more articles which match the user's watch-list preferences. But still, Gmail will clip emails that are more than a total of 102 KB of size, that we cannot stretch further. But we could reduce the effect and could include a number of articles and thus reduce the number of articles missed.

Do you have some such unique problem that needs to get fixed? Consult us, to get a solution to your unsolved problem.