(on mobile, desktop and web-based clients)

In last week’s article, we hoped to convince you that the from line is at least as important as the subject line in all your email communications. So, you should try to make it look as best as it should since usually it will be the first thing your recipients will look at, and the success of your newsletters is directly proportional to the time you take in tweaking each and every bit.

With this knowledge in mind, have you ever wondered what’s the maximum number of characters a from line should have before it’s cut off? You know, like if you’re reading an email from someone with a very long name, at one time the from line will be truncated and the rest of the characters will be replaced by either … or […]. Since this is rather unseemly, making you look a bit unprofessional, we tested different platforms and came up with the following “cheat-sheet”. Feel free to download it and use it when coming up with your next from line or if you’re thinking of changing your current one!

Email from line TIP: some email clients display the email address, while others the First and Last name defined in the account. So, you should have similar entries so that your recipients will always know who is sending the message.

Sadly, these are all the platforms we could get our hands on, so if you have an older generation iPhone/iPod (with 480x320px resolution), an iPad (both old gen. and new), a newer generation Android phone or tablet or any other such device, please let us know and help us improve this article.

As always, please leave your feedback either in the comments section below or at support@emailaddressmanager.com.

If you’re viewing this on a mobile phone on which images may be disabled or compressed, here is the data in text form as well.

• Maximum displayed length of the email from line on mobile email clients

Android 480x320px (portrait orientation) – 19

Android 480x320px (landscape orientation) – 19

Android 800x480px (portrait orientation) – 25

Android 800x480px (landscape orientation)- 25

iPhone 4&4S/iPod 4 960x640px (portrait orientation)  – 23

iPhone 4&4S/iPod 4 960x640px (landscape orientation) – 41

Windows Phone 7 (portrait orientation) – 18

Windows Phone 7 (landscape orientation) – 29 1/2

• Maximum displayed length of the email from line on PC Desktop-based email clients*

Outlook 2010 1024x768px (compact view)** – 11

Outlook 2010 1024x768px (preview view)** – 15

Thunderbird v.12 1024x768px** – 33

• Maximum displayed length of the email from line on Web-based email clients (viewed in browser) ***

Gmail 1024x768px– 24

Hotmail 1024x768px – 25

Yahoo! Mail 1024x768px (old view) – 29

Yahoo! Mail 1024x768px (modern view) – 23

* All desktop and web-based PC clients were tested with a 1024×768 px resolution. While it’s no longer the most widespread resolution used, you should tailor your from line to it since it’s the minimum resolution your recipients will likely use (the most common one is currently 1366×768 px).

** Also, please note that we tested all platforms on their default views. So, even if we tested on Outlook 2010, we chose the Compact and Preview views (similar to the interface in Outlook 2007 and 2003). Additionally, PC clients like Thunderbird and Outlook permit users to change the size of the displayed fields (so, we don’t think that any Outlook user will leave the from field on the default setting, since it’s so small – what is provided below is just the default character limit).

*** Some email clients display the from line as the email address, others as the First and Last name of the account. We chose the name fields to be identical to the address (thereare30charactersinthisline), since it is irrelevant which of them is displayed – the minimum character limit remains the same.

Addendum 1. We didn’t include the Apple iMac platform since the resolution used in their desktop and laptop offers is well above the 1024×764 minimum limit.

Addendum 2. While the email account name (thereare30charactersinthisline) does contain 30 characters, the email address (and thus, the from line on the clients which display it instead of the First and Last name fields) will contain 40 characters (in our example, thereare30charactersinthisline@gmail.com).

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