Most of your readers open email on a phone. Some phone mail apps, in particular the mail app built into many Android phones, resize the text in an email when they think it needs it. The same email can then look smaller there than it does in Gmail or on a computer, even though the font size is identical.
The Mailer builds every email so phones show it the way you wrote it. You do not have to do anything: it applies to every email, including ones built from your own templates.
What the Mailer does for you:
- Every email carries the standard instruction that tells mail apps to show text at the size it was written, instead of shrinking or enlarging it.
- The base text size, 16 pixels, is set on the message itself as well as on the content, so apps that ignore part of the email still get it.
- Those instructions are written twice, once in the email's style section and once on the elements themselves, because some mail apps remove the style section.
- The plain footer the Mailer adds when your design already has its own unsubscribe link carries the same instruction, so the footer never shrinks either.
The layout on a small screen:
- Your email sits in a column up to 600 pixels wide. On a computer it is centred with a margin around it.
- On a screen narrower than 620 pixels, the column runs edge to edge with 16 pixels of space at each side, so the words get the full width of the phone instead of a thick border.
- Images shrink to fit the screen and keep their shape.
- Long links and long words wrap instead of pushing the email wider than the screen.
Checking an email before you send it:
- Write your broadcast and send yourself a test.
- Open the test on your phone in the mail app most of your readers use.
- If you can, open it in a second app too, for example Gmail and the phone's built-in mail app.
- Compare the text size and the spacing with what you expect.
If text still does not look right:
- Check the font size you chose in the editor, and leave it there. Raising it to make up for one app makes it too large everywhere else.
- Send yourself a test and compare it in two apps, so you know whether it is one app or every app.
- Tell support which phone and which mail app you used, because each one behaves a little differently.
A real example:
Anna writes Leafwise Gardening's Frost prep email at the normal text size. She sends herself a test and opens it on her Android phone in the built-in mail app and in Gmail. Both show the same comfortable text size, the photo of covered seedlings fills the width of the screen, and the long link to her frost protection article wraps neatly instead of running off the edge.
Tips:
- Keep paragraphs short. They read far better on a phone.
- Put your main link or button near the top, where it is seen without scrolling.
- Use a template for a consistent look across every email. See Email Templates.
- For button and link styling, see The Email Editor: Links, Buttons And Fonts.