Did Google Gmail Change Its Styling Of Paragraphs In Emails?

While doing an email testing for one of clients, we realize that Google’s Gmail no longer supports paragraph as it meant to be. If you were to use paragraph tag (<p></p>), as you should, Gmail seems to ignore them.

Gmail handling of paragraph.

Looking at the sample email above, you can see that Gmail is ignoring the paragraph spacing. We hope this is just a temporary bug and Google will resolve them soon but for now, to workaround this issue, we have to declare a paragraph style, margin height to be specific on every paragraph tag:-

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
p {
margin-bottom: 16px;
}
–>
</style>

<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the first paragraph</p>
<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the second paragraph</p>
<p style=”margin-bottom: 16px;”>This is the third paragraph </p>

You can decide on the amount of spacing you want between your paragraph. For this sample we set it to 16px. Once you have done that, Gmail will start showing your paragraph correctly.

Gmail handling of paragraph, the right way.

We have tested this with other email clients to ensure that adding margin height does not cause any issue and the good news is, it doesn’t. Below are the list of email clients we tested on:-

  1. Gmail (Older version)
  2. Live Hotmail
  3. Yahoo! Mail
  4. Outlook 2000
  5. Outlook 2002/XP
  6. Outlook 2003
  7. Outlook 2007
  8. Lotus Notes 6.5
  9. Lotus Notes 7
  10. Lotus Notes 8
  11. Apple Mail 2.1
  12. Mobile Me
  13. Apple Mail 3
  14. Gmail
  15. Yahoo! Mail Classic
  16. Thunderbird 2.0
  17. Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 2

If you have a better way of handling this issue or if you know of any other issues on Gmail and have found ways to resolve it, please share them with us.