Why 600px Is the Email Newsletter Standard
Setting your newsletter's content width too wide can cause horizontal scrolling or broken layouts in some email clients. After years of real-world testing, 600px has become the standard width that renders reliably across major clients like Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail. This calculator uses that standard width to compute your actual content area based on padding and column count.
How the Calculation Works
Subtracting your left and right padding from the total email width (600px) gives the actual content area width. When splitting into 2 columns, the gap between columns is also subtracted before dividing by 2 to get the width of each column. Knowing these values ahead of time lets you design images and buttons that fit each column exactly.
How to Use This Tool
The calculated column width is useful for sizing images exactly. Since a 2-column layout often stacks vertically on mobile, it's a good idea to keep padding and gap small enough that each column stays at least 260-280px wide.
Frequently Asked Questions
A. 600px is the width that most email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) render reliably without extra configuration, which is why it became the long-standing industry standard.
A. A 600px layout is typically designed to shrink to 100% width via responsive media queries on smaller screens. The values from this calculator are the desktop maximum width.
A. It's technically possible, but readability drops on mobile as columns increase, so 1-2 columns is recommended for newsletters.