I’m creating an email template using HTML and running into a frustrating issue. When I send my email, it looks great in most email clients, but Gmail completely ignores my background positioning settings.
I have a full-width table element that needs a centered background image. While Outlook, Apple Mail, and other clients handle this correctly, Gmail just won’t cooperate with the background-position property.
I’ve already separated the background properties into individual CSS declarations since combining them causes display problems in various email clients. Has anyone found a reliable solution to make Gmail respect background image positioning? Any alternative approaches would be really helpful.
Gmail’s CSS support has been driving me crazy for years. It just strips out background-position completely, which is so frustrating. I’ve had good luck with nested tables instead of CSS positioning. Set up your main table with a solid background color as backup, then drop another table inside with your background image sized exactly right. This centers the image without any CSS properties Gmail will ignore. Another thing that’s saved me tons of headaches - use VML for Outlook and div-based layouts for everything else, including Gmail. Yeah, it makes your code messier, but you’ll get consistent results across all the major email clients. Just test everything thoroughly since Gmail can still be unpredictable even with these workarounds.
Gmail strips most CSS background properties, including positioning, so this is tricky. I switched to a single-cell table with the background image sized to match my container’s exact dimensions. Don’t rely on background-position - just create the image at the right size in Photoshop first. Use the background attribute on the table element since Gmail handles that better than CSS background properties. You can also try a div with display:table inside your existing table structure - Gmail handles this combo more reliably than pure CSS positioning. Make your background image the exact width and height you need instead of trying to position a larger image.
gmail’s background handling is completely broken. here’s what works for me: create a super wide background image (1200px+) and set it as the table background without any positioning. gmail will auto-center it when the image is wider than the container. just make sure your key content sits in the middle of the image file.