Gmail not displaying preheader properly?

[kana0_0ng]

Hello,

Has anyone else noticed Gmail not displaying the preheader properly?

It's showing what I set as the preheader text but then also starts showing what's in the email. This doesn't seem to happen with other email clients like Outlook and Apple.

I tried putting extra spaces at the end in the preheader but it didn't work. Has anyone found a solution?

Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman]

There's no standard for preheaders — it's up to the mail client to decide what to use as a preview/preheader-only body vs. full body.

So it's not so much that a client "starts showing the email" — it's that they decide their interpretation of the preheader encompasses that many characters of the entire email. You need to have a longer preheader to cover all clients.

[kana0_0ng]

But even when I shorten the preheader it still works in Outlook.

Does Gmail not support this?

I have a client that's new to Marketo, so I'm trying to see if this would happen no matter what system they're using.  I don't want them to think this is a Marketo problem if this is something that Gmail does no matter what. Also, if there are any workarounds for this besides always using long preheaders?

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's not a Marketo thing. Getting the preheader right is a bit of an art because you're trying to create an element-that's-not-an-element (in full body view) but isn't so much of a non-element that it gets removed completely.

[kana0_0ng · Accepted solution]

Thanks for confirming @SanfordWhiteman!

Incase anyone's interested, I ended up just using a mktoText element and set it to display: none for the preheader. This at least allowed the use of &nbsp; so that it could take up enough space and the rest of the email wouldn't appear in the Gmail preview. Too bad the built-in preheader tool in Marketo doesn't allow things like &nbsp; or <br>, but the client found this to be an acceptable workaround. 

[aniruddh]

Thanks kana0_0ng.

Can you please help me with the steps to have this mktoText element on our template.