GMail Drops Support for Background Images
Cyrill Gross
A few days ago (somewhat between July 15 and 19), GMail seems to have started rolling out a new version of their email html preprocessor which drops support for css background images. Learn more →
A few days ago (somewhat between July 15 and 19), GMail seems to have started rolling out a new version of their email html preprocessor which drops support for css background images. At the time of writing, only GMail webmail on some browsers (Chrome and Edge) from within certain regions of the world (North America and Australia) is affected.
What we know so far:
- The following CSS properties are not supported by GMail anymore:
background: url('IMAGE_URL')background-image: url('IMAGE_URL') - If GMail finds one of those, it will drop the entire css style, including any other css attributes.
- The change is not rolled out globally nor for all browsers (yet). See table below.
- The GMail Apps and G Suite are not (yet) affected.
- There is a (limited) workaround using the background=”IMAGE_URL” attribute.
Rollout table
The change has ben rolled out for the following browsers in the following regions:
| Region | Chrome | Safari | Edge | Firefox |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ |
| Asia | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ |
| Australia | ☑️ | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ |
| Europe | ⏳ | ⏳ | ⏳ | ⏳ |
| North America | ☑️ | ❔ | ☑️ | ⏳ |
| Middle East | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ |
| South America | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ | ❔ |
Workaround
There is a workaround of using the background=”IMAGE_URL” attribute on html elements. However, the background attribute is not part of the html5 standard and is only valid on a limited number of Tags (body, table, td, th, tr, marquee), see here.
We will keep an eye on the issue. If you have updates, let us know via comments, the Email Geeks Slack Channel or comment to the Github Post mentioned above.
