I hate Gmail.

June 25, 2018 2:21 PM

Is there a way to make Gmail to display the entire email I send someone, even if it thinks it can hide half the email behind a "more" ... ?

This happens to me CONSTANTLY, and it's really frustrating. Here's an example.

Me, team member, and photographer are on an email all together.

Me and team member drop the photographer off the email list and strategize what the shot list should be:

I think they should shoot:
apples
bananas
oranges

I add the photographer back in and send them an email:

Hello,

Thanks for being patient while we got our shot list together. Please make sure to shoot:
apples
bananas
oranges

But all the photographer sees is

Hello,

Thanks for being patient while we got our shot list together. Please make sure to shoot:
...

The rest gets cut off because I've sent it before, even though the photographer was not on that email.

Pasting as plain text (control + command + v) does not help. Literally the only fix I can come up with is telling people "make sure you're clicking the three dots to see my full email," which is unprofessional and embarrassing.

I'm pretty sure this is the purple text problem all over again and there's no solution, but I figured I'd ask.

posted by Juliet Banana to Technology (9 answers total)

Are you sure that the photographer is seeing the same "more" link that you're seeing? Because if they aren't privy to the rest of the thread, they shouldn't be. GMail is detecting text that has already been seen in the thread when making the decision to hide something, and they won't have seen this text before, so it shouldn't be hidden for them.

That said, if you want to be really sure, change the subject line of the email to start a new thread. It should show up as an entirely new conversation at that point, and nothing will be hidden. Or alternately, make some minor textual change to whatever you copy and paste, so that it's not an exact duplicate.
posted by Aleyn at 2:32 PM on June 25, 2018 [3 favorites]

Do you know for sure that the photographer is seeing [...] on her end? I'd venture to guess that it's only on your end.

Is the photographer on gmail or another platform? (Other platforms may not truncate the message.)
posted by hydra77 at 2:33 PM on June 25, 2018

In my experience, this happens only happens with forwarded text, or text that's otherwise pasted from an email already in Gmail (though I'm sure there's slightly more granularity to it than that). I get around it by pasting it as plain text. In my case, I do this using the app Flycut, but you can also use the 'strip formatting' button in Gmail, which looks like a little "Tx" in the formatting bar. (I think; I actually use Google Inbox, so I'm not totally familiar with what Gmail looks like these days.)
posted by tapir-whorf at 2:49 PM on June 25, 2018

Yeah, as Aleyn and hydra77, the "[...]" button isn't actually in the email that you sent, even though it seems to be.

(If you click the "Show original" link in the message's drop-down menu, you can verify that the "duplicate" text isn't marked in any special way, and the button's "show trimmed content" label doesn't appear in the data that was actually transmitted. In fact, there's no way for an email message itself to contain any kind of interactive content, for security reasons.)
posted by teraflop at 3:04 PM on June 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

I absolutely *hate* this "feature" of Gmail. The only way around this that I've ever come up with is to be very diligent about preceding each line of text I know to be duplicative with a period. (I suppose any character will work, but periods seem the least obtrusive.) So it'd be:

.apples
.bananas
.oranges

Not exactly professional, but sigh. Others might be right that the re-included photographer might not see the stupid ellipsis, but of course, everyone originally on your thread will see it.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 4:13 PM on June 25, 2018 [2 favorites]

In this case, it's hidden for you because it's already in a previous email in your inbox. When you hit "more" the text should be sort of a dark purple. But the photographer, who is getting this info for the first time, will not see "more" - they will just see the contents of the email like normal. So, what you describe is not correct - the photographer is not having anything hidden. If you're annoyed it's being hidden for you, that's one thing, but you should know what the photographer is seeing is not what you're seeing.
posted by AppleTurnover at 6:34 PM on June 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

yeah, if they're using a client (outlook for instance, or the built in iphone mail app) they'll just see the whole text of the email.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 12:37 PM on June 26, 2018

And you could also setup a desktop email client (Outlook, Postbox, or something else) to work with your Gmail account, and I believe the emails would look how you want them to.
posted by Leontine at 5:41 AM on June 27, 2018

Response by poster: I wish I had used this example.

Me to Designer:

Can the poster read:

Apple Presents
Banana
Starring Orange

Designer:

Sure, here's a proof.

Me:

Oh, actually, there have been some changes. Can you please update the poster to read:

Apple Presents
Banana
Starring Orange, Tangerine and Kumquat

but the designer only sees:

Oh, actually, there have been some changes. Can you please update the poster to read:

The rest gets cut off because I've sent it before, even though I've made important changes to the text.

I AM NOT IMAGINING THIS, THIS INTERFERES WITH MY ABILITY TO DO WORK :( :( :(
posted by Juliet Banana at 5:53 PM on July 10, 2018