Gmail ignores media queries if the CSS size is greater than 16KB

20 Jan 2017 by Marco Pracucci Comments

Gmail is rolling out support for media queries in its apps, including the iOS and Android app (you can find updates here). However, today I was investigating on why Gmail was ignoring the media queries on our newsletter, and I’ve apparently found a limitation.

When the size of <style></style> exceed 16KB (including whitespaces, comments and newlines), it looks that media queries are ignored on Gmail. If you split the CSS in multiple <style> blocks, it counts the total size of the CSS (so it’s not a workaround). On the contrary, minifying the CSS to keep it smaller can be a solution, if the minified version of the CSS is less than 16KB.

This is just my preliminary conclusion, without spending more time on that. Please advise if you find any other limitation, or your tests don’t match my finding. Thanks!

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