I added the ability to receive email updates for this blog. I used MailChimp RSS campaign template. I simply give MailChimp a link to my blog’s RSS feed and it will email subscribers whenever a new post is added to the feed.
After creating the campaign I noticed there is a big white space in the email right at the end of the blog post content. I also noticed this white space on Mark Suster’s both sides of the table email updates. He uses MailChimp and the same template I use.
I contacted MailChimp support. They said the reason behind this space is the option in the campaign to resize images to fit the template. This option resizes big images to fit the template and avoid horizontal scrolling. It also resizes small images making them as wide as the template.
The latter was the cause of the issue. There is a one pixel image at the end of every blog post. This image is there for WordPress to be able to track how many people read the post through the RSS feed. Because MailChimp resizes small images making them bigger, it is taking this 1 pixel image and making it at least 600 pixels wide, hence the white space.
One immediate solution to this is to disable resizing images. The risk of this solution is having horizontal scrolling inside your email in case of using a big picture.
Another solution is to generate a custom RSS feed from the original one without the tracking pixel and submitting this to MailChimp as the campaign feed.
A third solution would be MailChimp fixing this from the beginning and making the templates just as any responsive template. And give users the ability to use images at the original size if they want (I bet this will be of small usage).
I decided not to take the risk with the first option, and was too lazy to implement the second option. So I decided to not do anything about it.
As the Dutch people say “Niet perfect is ook goed”.
Not perfect is also good!
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