What email width is recommended?
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When you're starting a new template from scratch, you need to pick a width. The short answer is 600px, and it's the right default for almost everyone. It's not an arbitrary convention: it's the number that fits within Outlook's reading pane without triggering a horizontal scrollbar, scales down cleanly on mobile when paired with max-width: 600px; width: 100%; on the outer container, and is the baseline assumption built into most drag-and-drop template builders.
So if If your audience is mostly Gmail, Apple Mail, or mobile readers, you could go to 640px or even 700px without major issues. Wider layouts give you a little more room for typography and multi-column content at larger screen sizes. The tradeoff is that Outlook desktop on Windows caps the visible preview pane width, so anything wider than about 650px may clip on the right in preview view. If you have a significant B2B audience on Outlook, that's enough reason to stay at 600px. Email client rendering behavior differs enough by platform that there's no universally optimal width beyond the 600px baseline.
The container width and the content width aren't the same thing. You can set your outer wrapper to 600px while keeping inner content columns narrower, giving breathing room on the sides. Many designers use 560px for the content area inside a 600px container, leaving 20px of padding on each side. This makes text more readable and gives the layout a less cramped feel without changing the email's rendering footprint. Responsive design builds on this by adding breakpoints that collapse multi-column layouts to single-column on smaller screens.
If you've inherited a template and aren't sure whether the width is right, send a test to yourself and open it across a few clients. Pay attention to whether anything clips in Gmail desktop preview, how it feels on your phone, and whether the layout holds in Apple Mail. If you want to be thorough, a tool like Litmus renders your email across 100+ clients so you can see exactly how your chosen width behaves everywhere. Testing across clients is the fastest way to validate your width decision before committing to it at scale.
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