Email Not Displaying Correctly in Gmail: Fix CSS Flexbox Collapse for ActiveCampaign for Deliverability & Spam Audits
Spam filters analyze email HTML code quality alongside body copy. Unclosed tags, excessive styling block nesting, and broken link parameters are flagged as spam risks. Below is the targeted integration guide to fix CSS Flexbox Collapse inside Gmail Web (Desktop) templates when using ActiveCampaign.
Technical Breakdown
Gmail Web (Desktop) uses the Goog/WebKit Layout Engine which lacks support for standard rendering rules. This causes CSS Flexbox Collapse elements to break or collapse when rendering templates.
ActiveCampaign Behaviors
ActiveCampaign's editor parses HTML template imports and automatically cleans inline attributes, which can break VML tags. Always use absolute styles and avoid relying on classes. Run your finished layouts through the Spam Word Auditor to catch trigger phrases and verify structural delivery alignments before launching.
Remediation Code Block
To resolve this, modern layouts must be compiled down to Outlook-compliant nested HTML table models. Each flex container becomes a table row, and each flex child becomes a table data cell (td) with explicit pixel or percentage widths. In your ActiveCampaign campaign manager, make sure you configure your links to run via %UNSUBSCRIBELINK%.
<table role="presentation" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
<tr>
<td width="50%" valign="top" style="padding: 20px;">Column 1</td>
<td width="50%" valign="top" style="padding: 20px;">Column 2</td>
</tr>
</table>Live Code Sandbox Test
How to Deploy inside ActiveCampaign
Copy the fixed VML or table wrapper code block from the remediation box above.
Insert an 'HTML block' from the layout builder panels. Avoid standard text boxes, as the ActiveCampaign parser might strip conditional MSO comment strings on saving.