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UK email marketing agency Alchemy Worx recently announced an important change in the way that Gmail renders image code. I've re-posted the full announcement below. As a reminder, always use an email campaign preview tool to see what your email campaign is going to look like in various email clients prior to deployment!

From Alchemy Worx....

Why does this matter?
It matters because it causes unwanted spaces to be added to your email potentially breaking the layout of your HTML. Code that used to render perfectly may now render incorrectly.

The change appears to be affecting messages in Gmail webmail when viewed in Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. However it does not appear to have any effect on HTML emails in Gmail webmail viewed in Internet Explorer.

The solution
This issue is similar to a long-standing Hotmail bug. However, although you can fix this by addingat the top of your email in Hotmail, Gmail ignores this code so that fix will not work.

To ensure your HTML emails render the way they should in Gmail the following needs to be added to every image tag: style="display:block"

There is one exception: when you are displaying images directly alongside text, such as when you are wrapping text or putting images inside paragraphs.

Don't forget your triggered and transactional messages
The change will not just affect new messages you create, it will also affect any triggered or transactional email templates you have already set up.