Dear Smiles: your burning email questions, answered

A new advice column from the mascot who's seen every inbox horror story there is.

Once upon a time, every good newspaper had a Dear Abby. Every good inbox deserves one too, which is why we're introducing Dear Smiles, the column where RGE's own Smiles Davis tackles the email dilemmas keeping you up at night.

This first installment comes straight from the mailbag of our recent "Design Trends 2026: Let's Get Cooking" webinar, where hundreds of you sent in questions faster than we could keep up. We picked out some of the most-upvoted questions to answer here.

*Just noting up top that all emdashes are our own, baby

Dear Smiles: the font fiasco

I love a good display font, but Gmail and Outlook keep defaulting to Arial. How do I use fonts like Open Sans without my emails looking like a ransom note when they render? — Frustrated with Fallbacks

DEAR FRUSTRATED: There are a few different factors at play here, but the short version is to build for the fallback from day one. Make sure your web fonts are declared properly and paired with a solid fallback stack, so your brand font shows where it's supported and you gracefully step down to something safe (not sorry) everywhere else.

Our Help Center has the full walkthroughs on using custom fonts and using web fonts if you want to get it exactly right when using RGE Studio.

Dear Smiles: the clipping catastrophe

How critical is it to keep email size low so Gmail doesn't clip it? — Sizing Up My Sends

DEAR SIZING UP: Gmail clips around 102KB, and once that happens, your reader has to click to see the rest of the email, and any tracking pixel sitting below the clip line never fires. That means your open-rate data quietly breaks too. So, not ideal. The 102KB is just the size of the HTML and CSS, not the image weight, so a simple way to keep the size down is to limit how much text content you're putting in, and in general keep the amount of overall content restrained. Better to break up the content and send two emails rather than risk clipping with one that's too long. If you code your own emails, strip the CSS attributes back to just what's necessary and test, as it can be easy to accumulate lots of deprecated CSS fixes over the years that may not be needed now.

If you're feeling clipping curious, you can read more about it in our Help Center article here: Email Size & Gmail Clipping.

Dear Smiles: the picture-perfect product problem

My client's products are detail-heavy and benefit from multiple photos. What's the best image format and size to use without blowing past size limits? — Jammed on JPEGs

DEAR JAMMED: For product photography, JPEG is almost always your friend — it compresses well and you rarely need transparency for a product shot anyway. Save PNG for the moments you genuinely need a transparent background, like a logo overlay. Try to keep each image under 200KB where you can, since your main enemy is slow-loading images that lose the interest of your reader or flakey cell data connections that may not display your image at all.

A compressor like TinyPNG or EZGIF before upload can shave weight without visibly hurting quality, and if you're showing multiple angles, a carousel or grid layout lets you fit more product without stacking full-size images end to end.

Dear Smiles: the rounded corner runaround

Why won't my rounded corners and border-radius show up in Outlook? — Cornered in Outlook

DEAR CORNERED: You're not imagining it. Some Outlook versions (the desktop ones that lean on Word's rendering engine) simply don't support the CSS border-radius property, so buttons and images that look perfectly rounded everywhere else will render square there. It's a known email-client quirk, not a mistake on your end. If you code your own emails, you can utilize VML conditional markup to get it done. A <v:roundrect> element with a fixed size and the "arcsize" allows for corner roundness. If you're an RGE Studio customer, we implement that for you automatically, so you don't have to worry about it. Please, don't worry about rounded corners in Outlook. There are so many bigger things to worry about in life.

Dear Smiles: the image-text imbalance

How important is image-to-text ratio for deliverability in 2026? — Ratio Ridden

DEAR RATIO RIDDEN: Image-heavy emails aren't the deliverability death sentence they used to be. Spam filters have gotten smarter about context, sender reputation, and engagement history as the main factors for deliverability. That said, an email that's only a giant image is still a red flag as you risk someone not seeing your message at all if your audience has images turned off in the email client, or they don't have a stable data connection, or are using a screen reader. A healthy mix of real, selectable text alongside your visuals gives filters something substantive to read (and they do love substantive reading material) and gives every subscriber a fallback that still makes sense.

Dear Smiles: the dark mode dilemma

How critical is dark mode optimization in 2026, and what actually prevents rendering issues across unpredictable clients? — Living in the Shadows

DEAR LIVING IN THE SHADOWS: (Another Dear Smiles original — worth a gut check from the design team before it goes wide.) Dark mode isn't optional anymore; a huge share of inboxes default to it, and an email that wasn't built for it can turn into an unreadable mess of dark text on a dark background. The safest strategy is designing dark-mode-first: use transparent PNGs instead of white-background images, set explicit background colors rather than relying on "no color equals white," and test your palette in both modes before you hit send rather than after a subscriber tells you.

Dear Smiles: the video-element vexation

What tools would you recommend for adding video-like moving components into emails — not a full video clip, just simple motion? — Wanting Some Movement

DEAR WANTING SOME MOVEMENT: For motion without a real embedded video, animated GIFs remain the most widely supported option, and CSS animations (think looping micro-interactions on buttons or icons) work in the clients that support them and degrade gracefully in the ones that don't. If you want the more full "cinemagraph" feel, an animated GIF built specifically for that effect is usually more reliable across clients than trying to embed true video, which most email clients still block outright.

If you google, "free animated gif maker" you'll see a plethora of options like EZGif, or if you already use a design tool like Canva or Figma they have their own GIF makers as well. As you create your GIFs, do keep an eye on the frame count and that data size, as you want to keep it under 2MB, 1MB ideally for smooth loading.

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That's all the room Smiles has for today — but the mailbag's still overflowing. Part two lands next week with more of your questions, so keep an eye out.

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