Last entry in newsletter has messed-up user links, gravatars

Question

I received two newsletters today and both have the same odd behavior: the asker (or answer) link for the last entry is missing:

That question has several answers and, of course, an asker (none deleted). Here's another one:

Here the asker is reported just fine and we're told there's an answer; we even get a gravatar. But no name or vote count, despite the question having answers from extant users. Also, those gravatars don't belong to any of the users on that Q&A.

Those screen shots are from Gmail in a browser. I actually first noticed the problem in the Gmail app on my phone, where that part of the newsletter renders differently:

That's the same site as the first image. This time we get a gravatar, but that link is unexpected.

Curious about how long this has been going on, I looked back through older email. The last newsletter I received that didn't have this problem was on January 18. Then I didn't get any until January 22, where the problem showed up for the first time.

Answer 1

default locale explained the problem in a comment. The problem is with Gmail, not SE (though SE could mitigate).

Gmail automatically clips messages that are longer than 102k, and there is nothing users can do about it (other than get a new email provider, I guess). It's really easy to miss the "message clipped" notice at the bottom. If you do see and click on it, it launches a new tab with the whole message -- terrible UX, but we can't control what they do.

Newsletters recently started getting longer, and apparently they've now crossed Google's size threshold. When they do, Gmail cuts them off, even mid-link, resulting in ugliness like that shown in the question.

I don't know if newsletters really need to be as long as they are. Perhaps we should consider swapping the second section (greatest hits) with the third (unanswered questions); losing some greatest hits doesn't seem as bad as losing some questions the reader might have been able to answer for someone, had he clicked through and seen them.