17 ms·

Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

395 points by martinaglv 6y ago

IceWreck 6y ago
Still kinda useless, because most users still block (and should block) remote content including images by default. I'm tired of companies(and users) sending emails with trackers to check if someone has read your email or not.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  Do most users block images? I doubt it (but I have no data). I'd assume that most users use web clients, and very few if any web clients block images by default.
- jerrygoyal 6y ago
  trocker chrome extension is built for those who want to keep images and avoid pixel tracking.
martinaglv 6y ago
Hey! I am one of Mail Studio's authors. Will be happy to answer any questions.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  Electron or React Native? Why? Are you planning to support seamless integration with ESP so that the entire lifecycle from design to sending emails is supported?
  - martinaglv 6y ago
    The application is built on Electron. I think that visual editors like Mail Studio are one of the cases where this choice makes sense, since you are editing a live HTML page. You would need some a webview regardless of platform, but Electron makes the implementation easier. At the moment, we support ESP syncing, which create/update a template on the linked platform. You can then use it as the basis of a campaign.
    - ponytech 6y ago
      Why not a web app then?
      - dnh44 6y ago
        This is just a guess but if it were a web app then they'd have to support multiple browsers.
        tgv 6y ago
        But they have to support multiple mail clients anyway: macOS Mail is based on Webkit, Thunderbird on Gecko (Firefox), I guess it's Blink for many Android clients, and then there's a hundred versions of Outlook.
        iudqnolq 6y ago
        If you spend all your time making the output work cross-platform, I could definitely see not wanting to go on to spend a lot of time working on making the editor cross-platform. It's the same kind of tedium, but without much possibility for code-sharing.
    - dnh44 6y ago
      It looks really useful and the rationale behind using Electron makes sense, but I really dislike using non-native macOS apps. Still, I suppose it's better than not being able to run it at all. Good luck with the project!
      - D13Fd 6y ago
        Honestly using VS Code and Teams every day has convinced me that Electron apps are a net good. It's incredibly convenient that both of those apps work essentially identically on Mac & PC, and the Mac OS apps maintain feature parity with the PC versions. This is such a nice change, after years and years of bizarro-world Mac apps that have slowly become out-of-date, weird, or slow compared to the PC versions (ahem, Microsoft Office). Yes, there is a ton of overhead, but this feels like the way of the (near) future for cross-platform software. I'd love to see cross-platform Electron-based versions of apps like OmniOutliner, which is an incredible program that is held back by the lack of a PC version, meaning you can't share outlines or use it professionally.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Do you help users ensure your emails degrade gracefully when remote images aren't loaded or HTML email is disabled?
  - jonsully 6y ago
    Also interested in this question
  - martinaglv 6y ago
    Designs created in Mail Studio behave pretty much the same way as regular emails do if images are disabled. You should add alt text to your images and plan your design so that a missing graphic doesn't cause problems. Still, we're at version 1.0 so I imagine we can do more about this. The app handles the HTML part of the email, while the plaintext is entered by the user when preparing their campaign. We won't be of much help there.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      As a suggestion, you might consider recommending where missing alt text is, especially on call to action buttons, and perhaps providing a preview of what the email looks like with remote images disabled. Good mail providers will block remote images by default, and that's a trend I'd expect to become more prevalent over time.
- mxuribe 6y ago
  @martinaglv Sorry if this is a silly question: my day job is at a non-profit, would that be considered commercial or non-commercial use? Your tool seems very neat, so I would like to ensure compliance with your licensing/pricing. Thanks!
  - martinaglv 6y ago
    It will be better to reach out to our support so we can better evaluate the case.
- JimDabell 6y ago
  Your features page says this: > Email Previews > Quickly preview your design on real devices or share it with your team by sending it as an email message. But when I read the documentation, it seems like you just assume the user has a Litmus account. Is that correct? Given your paid plans start at $19.99/mo, I think it would be wise to be upfront about the fact that you need a $99/mo Litmus account for this feature to work. Mail client compatibility is the most complex and difficult thing to get right with HTML email design. If you need an external service to get this right, this needs to be clearer. Right now it seems you’re selling Litmus as if it’s your own functionality then expecting your customers to then go and pay much more to Litmus to actually get that functionality.
  - martinaglv 6y ago
    Apologies for any confusion that this line might have caused. > Quickly preview your design on real devices or share it with your team by sending it as an email message. This refers to the ability to send the design you are working on as an email message. When I wrote it I didn't even consider that it might be interpreted to state that we offer device testing. We don't. You can choose to send to a real device, or Litmus, or a colleague. But we don't offer testing on real devices. Still Mail Studio takes a lot of care to generate code that works cross-device so if you stick to visual editing (without writing custom HTML or CSS), your designs should work well everywhere even if you forgo real device testing.
    - rkagerer 6y ago
      When I read "Email Designer IDE", the first question that came to mind is whether it can show me renders of my email draft in all the popular clients (various versions of Outlook, web-based platforms like GMail, etc). When I found out it doesn't do that I simply stopped reading.
- howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
  Words of advice. Most businesses are using in-browser email composers (eg. Mailchimp) to create content rich messages. As nice as it may be to have the additional feature set, I suspect the push back on your pricing is going to kill your project. Highly recommend you rethink your revenue model. At most I would pay $7/month for this. If you want additional recurring charges you will have to integrate with my sender(s) and fit painlessly into my weekly marketing flow. Great idea, dangerous territory from a business perspective.
- mobilio 6y ago
  Mnogo dobre Martin! Daje si go drapnah. Imash li telefon?
- hakube 6y ago
  Is this the same with Bootstrap Studio and just rebranded it?
jonsully 6y ago
This looks really neat. I've spent _way_ too long on custom HTML for email signatures and email content without any tooling.. just an editor, some inline styles and a whole lot of pain. Looking forward to trying it out. No idea how y'all were able to figure out how to compile the dev-written code down to email-compliance for renderers as far back as you have, but kudos if it all works well. I could never get over how many different renderers and versions there are in the wild. Email is a TOUGH place for styling and it seems like Litmus just dominates everything else in the marketplace.
bellyfullofbac 6y ago
HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text/html+css, and clients who want can implement it. In theory you could have representations of the message like video/mpeg4 and text/plain, and depending on the client capabilities and configuration, the receiver could watch a video or read plain text. The information content of the 2 (or more) don't even have to be the same! Found this out when trying to parse text out of emails into a CRM system, another system sent information in the HTML part, but an empty plaintext part.
- dubcanada 6y ago
  I guess that's sort of what AMP is.
  - Ashanmaril 6y ago
    I didn't even know that was a thing until the other day where I saw someone post on Twitter that they got an email that had basically a web storefront within the email. It was selling some product and it had a color selector and cart, the whole thing. I assume the checkout process would kick you to their actual website but it's still kinda crazy.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  HTML in email is relatively uncomplicated once you understand the main limitations. The bigger challenge I find is setting the right expectation for what one can do in email, vs what certain stakeholders want to include in an email.
- D13Fd 6y ago
  It boggles my mind that Microsoft hasn't updated the Outlook desktop app to use the rendering engine from Edge rather than the 10+-year-old IE engine. That would resolve so many e-mail rendering issues. I imagine it must be due to security concerns.
  - meehow 6y ago
    Outlook comes with MS Office, so it's must render HTML with MS Word. Super logical ;)
cies 6y ago
MJML deserves a mention. We use it, together with mustache, to let users create their own mailings from some building blocks we offer. Works quite well!
- ericcholis 6y ago
  Curious, is this an in internal product?
  - leetrout 6y ago
    No https://mjml.io/ https://mjml.io/
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I haven't worked with it, but others on my team have used it to support high-visibility magazine newsletters, etc. Works great.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  MJML is great. We’ve developed a few hundred emails with it at this point and trained non-developers quite successfully. They use the MJML-provided editor or the Visual Studio plugin, and their visual Git tool of choice to make it easy to share components.
- robertlacok 6y ago
  I love MJML. Though the output delivers on the promise only 95% of times (I had to bend it a bit because of Gmail on iPhones), the experience for me as a developer is 100x better than working with visual builders. I was able to recreate our purchased template in like 15 minutes, now it’s much easier to edit.
  - spicybright 6y ago
    95% is an excellent number compared with hand crafted templates. I'm going to look into this, thank you for the suggestion!
- 6y ago
prepend 6y ago
This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value computation is up to y’all and your customers but office365 only costs $10/month. Seems tough to value authoring email as higher value than cloud productivity suite. It would be nice if there was a way people like me could use since our competition is an outlook template but still scale up to people who may do this all the time and be willing to pay $20+/month.
- D13Fd 6y ago
  Honestly I have no problem with monthly fees for software you use every day, or frequently, for professional use. I'm fine paying monthly for things like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, and 1Password. Those are all desktop apps, albeit with a cloud component that I mostly don't use. I easily get my money back 10x over (likely more) based on the income I generate with the apps. The pricing here seems targeted at media folks who do e-mail creation for a living. Assuming it works well, it's likely a bargain for them as well. But I have to imagine that market is rather small.
  - bdathi 6y ago
    Adobe is shitty. I only get lightroom in a abo which would be fine if the minimum time would be a month but it is a year. Best if both worlds for Adobe non for the consumer
    - krsdcbl 6y ago
      If you work with a broad range of their softwares (ps/ai/ae/premiere power user here) the subscription system is awesome. Ends up being cheaper than buying it used to be & much less upfront costs for the business. They could do better on many aspects but it's nowhere near "shitty".
twobitshifter 6y ago
I’m not sure I’d go with the IDE angle, even if it meets the definition. Looks like you support css and html, but an IDE really makes you think of software for primarily writing code and you’re trying to appeal to non-coders. This is a wysiwyg editor like Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is now $20.99 a month, and also supports newsletters. You have added features specific to email services, but I think a lower price might be needed.
trutannus 6y ago
Isn't this just Bootstrap Studio, but with less features? The UI is identical.
- deadbyte 6y ago
  Same company: Zine EOOD
inetknght 6y ago
Any HTML email that arrives to my inbox is usually marked as spam and phishing. Emails need to be clear and concise. HTML facilitates far too much hidden shit.
- D13Fd 6y ago
  Interesting take given that they are used by millions of people every day.
  - Seirdy 6y ago
    "Free" antivirus software, Windows 10 telemetry, Javascript, WeChat, WhatsApp, Google Chrome, Gmail, Facebook, and countless other software choices are used by millions of people today; that doesn't mean that feeling uncomfortable conforming to the norm is unwarranted. The millions of people you refer to probably (without realizing) send multipart messages with a plaintext version available. Emails without this are typically spam.
- cpursley 6y ago
  This perspective is just as silly as turning off JavaScript in browsers.
  - zwaps 6y ago
    Why is turning off javascript silly? Not that I personally disable all JS in my browser, but I'd say if your website can not be displayed without Javascript, then it is silly.
    - rhines 6y ago
      At one point I might have agreed with you, but after working on a few sites of my own I found that Javascript just enables a vastly better user experience. No need to refresh the page every time the user does something like liking a post or sending a comment, can load content more seamlessly with pre-loading or lazy loading, enables expandable menu bars to maximize space for content when the menu's not in use, things can be loaded faster and with less data usage if you send page diffs instead of full pages of markup, etc. Javascript's terrible when it's used to generate pages from bloated frameworks that create 5000 DOM elements, add listeners to everything, load a dozen external scripts, and so on, but it's really valuable when used to actually improve the user experience.
kleiba 6y ago
You have been tempted by the dark side. But it might not be too late to turn around and walk away.
comeonseriously 6y ago
I don't mean to be harsh but that video is awful. You're moving the screencast around while I'm trying to watch what is happening on the screen. And for no reason other than to just move the screencast around.
signal11 6y ago
An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in paragraphs with hyperlinks? It'd force you to write good copy, sure, but also it's more likely it'll get read. A complex layout often detracts from your message. Especially now with web-based clients implementing 'dark mode' and darkening your layouts, meaning you have less control over what the end-user sees. (Apologies if this is off-topic. I don't mean to denigrate the work designers do, I just feel it's more appropriate on the actual web rather than in email.)
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  Heh, even further than that, they're broken right out of the gate for some people - like me. I don't display any images in my emails. I don't want them using that to track my view of the content. Yea some email providers work around this, but some don't - i have it fully disabled. Most emails i view these days look like garbage.
- onion2k 6y ago
  You're talking about optimization. In your opinion emails with fancy layout and "on-brand" design will get a lower level of engagement than plain text with well-written copy. You may well be right (in a lot of cases.) But you don't know that. It's a guess based on your biases and assumptions. This is why it's critically important to measure things when you optimize them. Believing that you should engage with your customers in a way that you like because "they're just like me, so they'll like what I like" is an easy way to kill your messaging dead. Optimization of something like email is a matter of constantly measuring, refining, and measuring again.
  - buro9 6y ago
    What I do know from measuring my marketing and transactional emails is that the least possible formatting results in the lowest probability that I end up in the spam folder. The hypothesis I had here (unverified) is that using a tool to produce email makes your email look like spam produced by that tool (by other people). My hypothesis more specifically is that spam detection software weighs similarity in the structure equally to similarity in content. My HTML emails have since been modified to be absolutely minimal HTML as hints to the layout and nothing else. They are more like plain text emails that have been polished with just the lightest sprinkle of HTML and CSS but nothing more. The result of keeping things simple is that my deliverability is over 99% and the open rate also phenomenally high.
supermatt 6y ago
Very nice, however: > The designs that you create in Mail Studio are compatible with everything from iOS Mail to Outlook 2007 and > If you like writing code, you will love Mail Studio’s CSS editor. You get autocomplete, support for CSS variables (custom props) and media queries. are mutually exclusive.
- sensanaty 6y ago
  Way I interpret it is that that you write down your markup/CSS, and the app spits out compliant HTML that will render properly regardless of email client. Might be wrong, though.
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    Sounds like a bit like Emogrifier [0] or other "inliners" but media queries seem a bit suspect. [0] https://www.myintervals.com/emogrifier.php https://www.myintervals.com/emogrifier.php
ddevault 6y ago
HTML emails are a blight on the internet. If you send me this crap, I will mark it as spam. https://useplaintext.email https://useplaintext.email
stefanvdw1 6y ago
I’ve been using Bootstrap Studio[1] for a while now from the same company and I have to say I’m very satisfied. Updates are frequent, support is responsive and it’s easy to use. Of course tools like this aren’t necessary to work with Bootstrap or create emails, but it has saved me a lot of time which is valuable in itself. 1. https://bootstrapstudio.io https://bootstrapstudio.io
AlphaGeekZulu 6y ago
No. On the other hand: if there is still any living person out there voluntarily displaying HTML mail as such, they probably want to suffer. So, ok. I won't see any of it anyways. HTML-designed mails go straight to my bin...
miga 6y ago
Best of the Fool's Day. Next we need IDE for designing DMCA notices.
bandie91 6y ago
i would appreciate if they only could send meaningful plain text messages BESIDES the text/html bloat they send, not garbage. or do not add text/plain at all. i often ancounter emails with multipart/alternative containing text/html and text/plain too but the plain part is 1) the HTML source, or 2) exists but empty, or in the best case 3) something like "see the html part", or in the worst case 4) a seemingly valid text but actually an earlier version of that in the html, or 4/b) valid text but with template variables not substituted with actual data.
- megous 6y ago
  3) is funny because I have preference to view text/plain if it's present, and this just breaks it for the sender For webapps I develop I make sure text/plain part is actually nice, not just passable. It's good for me too, because I can query the emails sent by the app from a database, and just see their content, and not the convoluted bloated garbage that mjml and friends spit out.
smalltalks 6y ago
The developer is super smart , it's Bootstrap Studio[0] rebranded as something new. I remember Michael Seibel talking about YC company "launching multiple times" because you shouldn't be stopping until you find your product market fit. This time it's seems like the right shot , but the pricing is quite high for what is it... [0]https://bootstrapstudio.io/ https://bootstrapstudio.io/
- ihaveajob 6y ago
  I had your same intuition and went on to find out more. They also produced https://epicbootstrap.com https://epicbootstrap.com which is probably a nice way to get some SEO juice. Good for them.
zwaps 6y ago
I receive a lot of newsletters and communiqués, some of which I even signed up for. So, I don't know what designers use to receive e-mail, but here in the non-designer / non-linux world, Outlook is pretty popular. Now, Outlook - at least all configurations I have seen, has pictures via HTML disabled. I have sampled a few IT departments only, of course, but I feel like this is probably a pretty common policy. So let me tell you: Your picture banners, your "rounded corner buttons", your main engagement centerpiece that's just a picture ... it all ends up being one of those nice 90's type beveled empty box we remember from surfing with IE and ISDN. This may be a shock, but it really doesn't make your important newsletter look any better. So, if you are not specifically going for nostalgic "bad modem connection" look and feel, maybe ease off the HTML pictures a bit, okay?
- colechristensen 6y ago
  People who use gmail/gsuite get html emails, the images are proxied by google. People using gmail are a huge chunk of the market.
  - uberswe 6y ago
    I did not know that images get proxied. Either way, I use gmail with images turned off by default and I rarely enable images for specific senders.
  - Humdeee 6y ago
    Interesting. I've always thought that images within emails would also serve as a read receipt to the server that sent them when enabled or shown. Would this still apply? Google providing a proxy for this could totally pollute this data (which could be a good thing!).
    - ncallaway 6y ago
      My understanding is that is exactly why Google provides a proxy for that.
      - 6y ago
qwerty456127 6y ago
Is there even a standard for rich email? For me it feels like we need one and it should say e-mail must be UTF-8 Markdown.
clarge1120 6y ago
I'm watching to see if this takes off, and how the developer does. It's already at the top of HN, so that's a great start. The developer has positioned this as a much needed solution to an age-old problem: how to make Outlook-compatible email look great. But $19 per month for a specialized HTML editor is expensive to say the least.
bitmapbrother 6y ago
We've now reached the intersection of Photoshop and Email.
saos 6y ago
Its very ninche tbh. I think more needs to be done to empower marketers who don't really care about HTML. I know the web and email and different but its just crazy how slow email is. Its still 10 years behind stuck using <table> layouts. Just insane. Microsoft for starters should stop with actionable emails and start supportingbasic semantic HTML and CSS3 in all their clients.
- hedora 6y ago
  100% of carefully formatted HTML email is spam. There’s no client side demand for better spam renderers. The only reason web browsers are on the surveillance capitalism treadmill is that people are essentially forced to continually upgrade to the newest, shiniest version, since stuff like banking and shopping break otherwise. If anything, I want my email client to support less of HTML. I already have images (and, I hope, javascript — better check) disabled. Nuking custom fonts would be nice too. If this breaks the rendering of a message, 99% of the time, that’s a feature, not a bug. Heck, I wish there was an open, simplified HTML news renderer where there is no JavaScript or tracking, and publishers target it directly (I pay for access to a closed app like this, but it is a walled garden.)
  - Seirdy 6y ago
    > Heck, I wish there was an open, simplified HTML news renderer where there is no JavaScript or tracking, and publishers target it directly Sounds like you want an RSS reader.
andrei_says_ 6y ago
As someone who has been through the creation and maintenance of an in house email design system and builder, I’ll leave this link here: https://litmus.com/community/discussions/4990-outlook-2016-1px-horizontal-lines-showing-up-in-the-body https://litmus.com/community/discussions/4990-outlook-2016-1... It is the latest of many issues we’re facing caused by the despicable lack of consistency, especially in Microsoft’s email clients. As for an email designing software, what my organization needed was a set of predesigned components with predefined variations - to form a somewhat flexible but disciplined email design system. A design studio wouldn’t really work for us- the same way a website CMS should not allow complete freedom to its editors. Design decisions should be separate from content decisions.
selfishgene 6y ago
Best open source alternative?
arendtio 6y ago
I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is a Linux version available :-)
maydemir 6y ago
I've been looking for something like this for a very long time. Can it be integrated with systems such as SendGrid? or will it be integrated in the future?
williesleg 6y ago
Finally some hacker news and not political bullshit on my hacker news website.
cafed00d 6y ago
I wonder who the target consumer for this would be. I mean, I get that the target users are probably marketing departments / communications people across the world’s companies. But genuinely curious who’s the end-customer who reads these emails. Email is a strange technology that is only used for _reading words_ more than anything else — office work, receipts, itineraries, bills etc etc. Even the best newsletters, imo, tend to be word-heavy than imagery (such as Candor or Levels.fyi or Chairman Mom). Would be cool if a Mail IDE had a way to tell if the email I’m writing is _engaging_ enough simply by the words alone. Some day perhaps.
smilbandit 6y ago
Any thoughts on integrations with Litmus or Emails on Acid?
rmason 6y ago
Noticed that the video borrows New York Columbo family capo's, Michael Franzese, theme music from his YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+franzese https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+franzes...
xbar 6y ago
I fantasize about using this for one or two of the (many) emails I send per day.
Mooty 6y ago
Is this GrapesJS ;) ?
ct520 6y ago
Pingendo is that you?
blahyawnblah 6y ago
I've been using Zurb's Foundation email stuff. Works great.
geniium 6y ago
Bring me Dreamweaver back
pkulak 6y ago
At first I wasn't going to run a Bash script for installation, but wow, this one is nice. It's just an AppImage, and the script just adds .desktop files and such, and only for the local user. The only suggestion I would make, would be to use/make an Applications folder. I think that's the recommended place to put AppImages. Having it's own dotfolder in my home dir is a bit... cluttering.
marderfarker2 6y ago
This looks like an exact copy of Bootstrap studio.
hakube 6y ago
This is just a rebranded Bootstrap Studio

395 points by martinaglv 6y ago

Still kinda useless, because most users still block (and should block) remote content including images by default. I'm tired of companies(and users) sending emails with trackers to check if someone has read your email or not.

yoz-y 6y ago
Do most users block images? I doubt it (but I have no data). I'd assume that most users use web clients, and very few if any web clients block images by default.
jerrygoyal 6y ago
trocker chrome extension is built for those who want to keep images and avoid pixel tracking.

martinaglv 6y ago

Hey! I am one of Mail Studio's authors. Will be happy to answer any questions.

arkitaip 6y ago
Electron or React Native? Why? Are you planning to support seamless integration with ESP so that the entire lifecycle from design to sending emails is supported?
- martinaglv 6y ago
  The application is built on Electron. I think that visual editors like Mail Studio are one of the cases where this choice makes sense, since you are editing a live HTML page. You would need some a webview regardless of platform, but Electron makes the implementation easier. At the moment, we support ESP syncing, which create/update a template on the linked platform. You can then use it as the basis of a campaign.
  - ponytech 6y ago
    Why not a web app then?
    - dnh44 6y ago
      This is just a guess but if it were a web app then they'd have to support multiple browsers.
      - tgv 6y ago
        But they have to support multiple mail clients anyway: macOS Mail is based on Webkit, Thunderbird on Gecko (Firefox), I guess it's Blink for many Android clients, and then there's a hundred versions of Outlook.
        iudqnolq 6y ago
        If you spend all your time making the output work cross-platform, I could definitely see not wanting to go on to spend a lot of time working on making the editor cross-platform. It's the same kind of tedium, but without much possibility for code-sharing.
  - dnh44 6y ago
    It looks really useful and the rationale behind using Electron makes sense, but I really dislike using non-native macOS apps. Still, I suppose it's better than not being able to run it at all. Good luck with the project!
    - D13Fd 6y ago
      Honestly using VS Code and Teams every day has convinced me that Electron apps are a net good. It's incredibly convenient that both of those apps work essentially identically on Mac & PC, and the Mac OS apps maintain feature parity with the PC versions. This is such a nice change, after years and years of bizarro-world Mac apps that have slowly become out-of-date, weird, or slow compared to the PC versions (ahem, Microsoft Office). Yes, there is a ton of overhead, but this feels like the way of the (near) future for cross-platform software. I'd love to see cross-platform Electron-based versions of apps like OmniOutliner, which is an incredible program that is held back by the lack of a PC version, meaning you can't share outlines or use it professionally.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Do you help users ensure your emails degrade gracefully when remote images aren't loaded or HTML email is disabled?
- jonsully 6y ago
  Also interested in this question
- martinaglv 6y ago
  Designs created in Mail Studio behave pretty much the same way as regular emails do if images are disabled. You should add alt text to your images and plan your design so that a missing graphic doesn't cause problems. Still, we're at version 1.0 so I imagine we can do more about this. The app handles the HTML part of the email, while the plaintext is entered by the user when preparing their campaign. We won't be of much help there.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    As a suggestion, you might consider recommending where missing alt text is, especially on call to action buttons, and perhaps providing a preview of what the email looks like with remote images disabled. Good mail providers will block remote images by default, and that's a trend I'd expect to become more prevalent over time.
mxuribe 6y ago
@martinaglv Sorry if this is a silly question: my day job is at a non-profit, would that be considered commercial or non-commercial use? Your tool seems very neat, so I would like to ensure compliance with your licensing/pricing. Thanks!
- martinaglv 6y ago
  It will be better to reach out to our support so we can better evaluate the case.
JimDabell 6y ago
Your features page says this: > Email Previews > Quickly preview your design on real devices or share it with your team by sending it as an email message. But when I read the documentation, it seems like you just assume the user has a Litmus account. Is that correct? Given your paid plans start at $19.99/mo, I think it would be wise to be upfront about the fact that you need a $99/mo Litmus account for this feature to work. Mail client compatibility is the most complex and difficult thing to get right with HTML email design. If you need an external service to get this right, this needs to be clearer. Right now it seems you’re selling Litmus as if it’s your own functionality then expecting your customers to then go and pay much more to Litmus to actually get that functionality.
- martinaglv 6y ago
  Apologies for any confusion that this line might have caused. > Quickly preview your design on real devices or share it with your team by sending it as an email message. This refers to the ability to send the design you are working on as an email message. When I wrote it I didn't even consider that it might be interpreted to state that we offer device testing. We don't. You can choose to send to a real device, or Litmus, or a colleague. But we don't offer testing on real devices. Still Mail Studio takes a lot of care to generate code that works cross-device so if you stick to visual editing (without writing custom HTML or CSS), your designs should work well everywhere even if you forgo real device testing.
  - rkagerer 6y ago
    When I read "Email Designer IDE", the first question that came to mind is whether it can show me renders of my email draft in all the popular clients (various versions of Outlook, web-based platforms like GMail, etc). When I found out it doesn't do that I simply stopped reading.
howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
Words of advice. Most businesses are using in-browser email composers (eg. Mailchimp) to create content rich messages. As nice as it may be to have the additional feature set, I suspect the push back on your pricing is going to kill your project. Highly recommend you rethink your revenue model. At most I would pay $7/month for this. If you want additional recurring charges you will have to integrate with my sender(s) and fit painlessly into my weekly marketing flow. Great idea, dangerous territory from a business perspective.
mobilio 6y ago
Mnogo dobre Martin! Daje si go drapnah. Imash li telefon?
hakube 6y ago
Is this the same with Bootstrap Studio and just rebranded it?

jonsully 6y ago

This looks really neat. I've spent _way_ too long on custom HTML for email signatures and email content without any tooling.. just an editor, some inline styles and a whole lot of pain. Looking forward to trying it out. No idea how y'all were able to figure out how to compile the dev-written code down to email-compliance for renderers as far back as you have, but kudos if it all works well. I could never get over how many different renderers and versions there are in the wild. Email is a TOUGH place for styling and it seems like Litmus just dominates everything else in the marketplace.

bellyfullofbac 6y ago

HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text/html+css, and clients who want can implement it. In theory you could have representations of the message like video/mpeg4 and text/plain, and depending on the client capabilities and configuration, the receiver could watch a video or read plain text. The information content of the 2 (or more) don't even have to be the same! Found this out when trying to parse text out of emails into a CRM system, another system sent information in the HTML part, but an empty plaintext part.

dubcanada 6y ago
I guess that's sort of what AMP is.
- Ashanmaril 6y ago
  I didn't even know that was a thing until the other day where I saw someone post on Twitter that they got an email that had basically a web storefront within the email. It was selling some product and it had a color selector and cart, the whole thing. I assume the checkout process would kick you to their actual website but it's still kinda crazy.
iamacyborg 6y ago
HTML in email is relatively uncomplicated once you understand the main limitations. The bigger challenge I find is setting the right expectation for what one can do in email, vs what certain stakeholders want to include in an email.
D13Fd 6y ago
It boggles my mind that Microsoft hasn't updated the Outlook desktop app to use the rendering engine from Edge rather than the 10+-year-old IE engine. That would resolve so many e-mail rendering issues. I imagine it must be due to security concerns.
- meehow 6y ago
  Outlook comes with MS Office, so it's must render HTML with MS Word. Super logical ;)

cies 6y ago

MJML deserves a mention. We use it, together with mustache, to let users create their own mailings from some building blocks we offer. Works quite well!

ericcholis 6y ago
Curious, is this an in internal product?
- leetrout 6y ago
  No https://mjml.io/ https://mjml.io/
52-6F-62 6y ago
I haven't worked with it, but others on my team have used it to support high-visibility magazine newsletters, etc. Works great.
1123581321 6y ago
MJML is great. We’ve developed a few hundred emails with it at this point and trained non-developers quite successfully. They use the MJML-provided editor or the Visual Studio plugin, and their visual Git tool of choice to make it easy to share components.
robertlacok 6y ago
I love MJML. Though the output delivers on the promise only 95% of times (I had to bend it a bit because of Gmail on iPhones), the experience for me as a developer is 100x better than working with visual builders. I was able to recreate our purchased template in like 15 minutes, now it’s much easier to edit.
- spicybright 6y ago
  95% is an excellent number compared with hand crafted templates. I'm going to look into this, thank you for the suggestion!
6y ago

prepend 6y ago

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value computation is up to y’all and your customers but office365 only costs $10/month. Seems tough to value authoring email as higher value than cloud productivity suite. It would be nice if there was a way people like me could use since our competition is an outlook template but still scale up to people who may do this all the time and be willing to pay $20+/month.

D13Fd 6y ago
Honestly I have no problem with monthly fees for software you use every day, or frequently, for professional use. I'm fine paying monthly for things like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, and 1Password. Those are all desktop apps, albeit with a cloud component that I mostly don't use. I easily get my money back 10x over (likely more) based on the income I generate with the apps. The pricing here seems targeted at media folks who do e-mail creation for a living. Assuming it works well, it's likely a bargain for them as well. But I have to imagine that market is rather small.
- bdathi 6y ago
  Adobe is shitty. I only get lightroom in a abo which would be fine if the minimum time would be a month but it is a year. Best if both worlds for Adobe non for the consumer
  - krsdcbl 6y ago
    If you work with a broad range of their softwares (ps/ai/ae/premiere power user here) the subscription system is awesome. Ends up being cheaper than buying it used to be & much less upfront costs for the business. They could do better on many aspects but it's nowhere near "shitty".

twobitshifter 6y ago

I’m not sure I’d go with the IDE angle, even if it meets the definition. Looks like you support css and html, but an IDE really makes you think of software for primarily writing code and you’re trying to appeal to non-coders. This is a wysiwyg editor like Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is now $20.99 a month, and also supports newsletters. You have added features specific to email services, but I think a lower price might be needed.

trutannus 6y ago

Isn't this just Bootstrap Studio, but with less features? The UI is identical.

deadbyte 6y ago
Same company: Zine EOOD

inetknght 6y ago

Any HTML email that arrives to my inbox is usually marked as spam and phishing. Emails need to be clear and concise. HTML facilitates far too much hidden shit.

D13Fd 6y ago
Interesting take given that they are used by millions of people every day.
- Seirdy 6y ago
  "Free" antivirus software, Windows 10 telemetry, Javascript, WeChat, WhatsApp, Google Chrome, Gmail, Facebook, and countless other software choices are used by millions of people today; that doesn't mean that feeling uncomfortable conforming to the norm is unwarranted. The millions of people you refer to probably (without realizing) send multipart messages with a plaintext version available. Emails without this are typically spam.
cpursley 6y ago
This perspective is just as silly as turning off JavaScript in browsers.
- zwaps 6y ago
  Why is turning off javascript silly? Not that I personally disable all JS in my browser, but I'd say if your website can not be displayed without Javascript, then it is silly.
  - rhines 6y ago
    At one point I might have agreed with you, but after working on a few sites of my own I found that Javascript just enables a vastly better user experience. No need to refresh the page every time the user does something like liking a post or sending a comment, can load content more seamlessly with pre-loading or lazy loading, enables expandable menu bars to maximize space for content when the menu's not in use, things can be loaded faster and with less data usage if you send page diffs instead of full pages of markup, etc. Javascript's terrible when it's used to generate pages from bloated frameworks that create 5000 DOM elements, add listeners to everything, load a dozen external scripts, and so on, but it's really valuable when used to actually improve the user experience.

kleiba 6y ago

You have been tempted by the dark side. But it might not be too late to turn around and walk away.

comeonseriously 6y ago

I don't mean to be harsh but that video is awful. You're moving the screencast around while I'm trying to watch what is happening on the screen. And for no reason other than to just move the screencast around.

signal11 6y ago

An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in paragraphs with hyperlinks? It'd force you to write good copy, sure, but also it's more likely it'll get read. A complex layout often detracts from your message. Especially now with web-based clients implementing 'dark mode' and darkening your layouts, meaning you have less control over what the end-user sees. (Apologies if this is off-topic. I don't mean to denigrate the work designers do, I just feel it's more appropriate on the actual web rather than in email.)

adkadskhj 6y ago
Heh, even further than that, they're broken right out of the gate for some people - like me. I don't display any images in my emails. I don't want them using that to track my view of the content. Yea some email providers work around this, but some don't - i have it fully disabled. Most emails i view these days look like garbage.
onion2k 6y ago
You're talking about optimization. In your opinion emails with fancy layout and "on-brand" design will get a lower level of engagement than plain text with well-written copy. You may well be right (in a lot of cases.) But you don't know that. It's a guess based on your biases and assumptions. This is why it's critically important to measure things when you optimize them. Believing that you should engage with your customers in a way that you like because "they're just like me, so they'll like what I like" is an easy way to kill your messaging dead. Optimization of something like email is a matter of constantly measuring, refining, and measuring again.
- buro9 6y ago
  What I do know from measuring my marketing and transactional emails is that the least possible formatting results in the lowest probability that I end up in the spam folder. The hypothesis I had here (unverified) is that using a tool to produce email makes your email look like spam produced by that tool (by other people). My hypothesis more specifically is that spam detection software weighs similarity in the structure equally to similarity in content. My HTML emails have since been modified to be absolutely minimal HTML as hints to the layout and nothing else. They are more like plain text emails that have been polished with just the lightest sprinkle of HTML and CSS but nothing more. The result of keeping things simple is that my deliverability is over 99% and the open rate also phenomenally high.

supermatt 6y ago

Very nice, however: > The designs that you create in Mail Studio are compatible with everything from iOS Mail to Outlook 2007 and > If you like writing code, you will love Mail Studio’s CSS editor. You get autocomplete, support for CSS variables (custom props) and media queries. are mutually exclusive.

sensanaty 6y ago
Way I interpret it is that that you write down your markup/CSS, and the app spits out compliant HTML that will render properly regardless of email client. Might be wrong, though.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  Sounds like a bit like Emogrifier [0] or other "inliners" but media queries seem a bit suspect. [0] https://www.myintervals.com/emogrifier.php https://www.myintervals.com/emogrifier.php

ddevault 6y ago

HTML emails are a blight on the internet. If you send me this crap, I will mark it as spam. https://useplaintext.email https://useplaintext.email

stefanvdw1 6y ago

I’ve been using Bootstrap Studio[1] for a while now from the same company and I have to say I’m very satisfied. Updates are frequent, support is responsive and it’s easy to use. Of course tools like this aren’t necessary to work with Bootstrap or create emails, but it has saved me a lot of time which is valuable in itself. 1. https://bootstrapstudio.io https://bootstrapstudio.io

AlphaGeekZulu 6y ago

No. On the other hand: if there is still any living person out there voluntarily displaying HTML mail as such, they probably want to suffer. So, ok. I won't see any of it anyways. HTML-designed mails go straight to my bin...

miga 6y ago

Best of the Fool's Day. Next we need IDE for designing DMCA notices.

bandie91 6y ago

i would appreciate if they only could send meaningful plain text messages BESIDES the text/html bloat they send, not garbage. or do not add text/plain at all. i often ancounter emails with multipart/alternative containing text/html and text/plain too but the plain part is 1) the HTML source, or 2) exists but empty, or in the best case 3) something like "see the html part", or in the worst case 4) a seemingly valid text but actually an earlier version of that in the html, or 4/b) valid text but with template variables not substituted with actual data.

megous 6y ago
3) is funny because I have preference to view text/plain if it's present, and this just breaks it for the sender For webapps I develop I make sure text/plain part is actually nice, not just passable. It's good for me too, because I can query the emails sent by the app from a database, and just see their content, and not the convoluted bloated garbage that mjml and friends spit out.

smalltalks 6y ago

The developer is super smart , it's Bootstrap Studio[0] rebranded as something new. I remember Michael Seibel talking about YC company "launching multiple times" because you shouldn't be stopping until you find your product market fit. This time it's seems like the right shot , but the pricing is quite high for what is it... [0]https://bootstrapstudio.io/ https://bootstrapstudio.io/

ihaveajob 6y ago
I had your same intuition and went on to find out more. They also produced https://epicbootstrap.com https://epicbootstrap.com which is probably a nice way to get some SEO juice. Good for them.

zwaps 6y ago

I receive a lot of newsletters and communiqués, some of which I even signed up for. So, I don't know what designers use to receive e-mail, but here in the non-designer / non-linux world, Outlook is pretty popular. Now, Outlook - at least all configurations I have seen, has pictures via HTML disabled. I have sampled a few IT departments only, of course, but I feel like this is probably a pretty common policy. So let me tell you: Your picture banners, your "rounded corner buttons", your main engagement centerpiece that's just a picture ... it all ends up being one of those nice 90's type beveled empty box we remember from surfing with IE and ISDN. This may be a shock, but it really doesn't make your important newsletter look any better. So, if you are not specifically going for nostalgic "bad modem connection" look and feel, maybe ease off the HTML pictures a bit, okay?

colechristensen 6y ago
People who use gmail/gsuite get html emails, the images are proxied by google. People using gmail are a huge chunk of the market.
- uberswe 6y ago
  I did not know that images get proxied. Either way, I use gmail with images turned off by default and I rarely enable images for specific senders.
- Humdeee 6y ago
  Interesting. I've always thought that images within emails would also serve as a read receipt to the server that sent them when enabled or shown. Would this still apply? Google providing a proxy for this could totally pollute this data (which could be a good thing!).
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    My understanding is that is exactly why Google provides a proxy for that.
    - 6y ago

qwerty456127 6y ago

Is there even a standard for rich email? For me it feels like we need one and it should say e-mail must be UTF-8 Markdown.

clarge1120 6y ago

I'm watching to see if this takes off, and how the developer does. It's already at the top of HN, so that's a great start. The developer has positioned this as a much needed solution to an age-old problem: how to make Outlook-compatible email look great. But $19 per month for a specialized HTML editor is expensive to say the least.

bitmapbrother 6y ago

We've now reached the intersection of Photoshop and Email.

saos 6y ago

Its very ninche tbh. I think more needs to be done to empower marketers who don't really care about HTML. I know the web and email and different but its just crazy how slow email is. Its still 10 years behind stuck using <table> layouts. Just insane. Microsoft for starters should stop with actionable emails and start supportingbasic semantic HTML and CSS3 in all their clients.

hedora 6y ago
100% of carefully formatted HTML email is spam. There’s no client side demand for better spam renderers. The only reason web browsers are on the surveillance capitalism treadmill is that people are essentially forced to continually upgrade to the newest, shiniest version, since stuff like banking and shopping break otherwise. If anything, I want my email client to support less of HTML. I already have images (and, I hope, javascript — better check) disabled. Nuking custom fonts would be nice too. If this breaks the rendering of a message, 99% of the time, that’s a feature, not a bug. Heck, I wish there was an open, simplified HTML news renderer where there is no JavaScript or tracking, and publishers target it directly (I pay for access to a closed app like this, but it is a walled garden.)
- Seirdy 6y ago
  > Heck, I wish there was an open, simplified HTML news renderer where there is no JavaScript or tracking, and publishers target it directly Sounds like you want an RSS reader.

andrei_says_ 6y ago

As someone who has been through the creation and maintenance of an in house email design system and builder, I’ll leave this link here: https://litmus.com/community/discussions/4990-outlook-2016-1px-horizontal-lines-showing-up-in-the-body https://litmus.com/community/discussions/4990-outlook-2016-1... It is the latest of many issues we’re facing caused by the despicable lack of consistency, especially in Microsoft’s email clients. As for an email designing software, what my organization needed was a set of predesigned components with predefined variations - to form a somewhat flexible but disciplined email design system. A design studio wouldn’t really work for us- the same way a website CMS should not allow complete freedom to its editors. Design decisions should be separate from content decisions.

selfishgene 6y ago

Best open source alternative?

arendtio 6y ago

I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is a Linux version available :-)

maydemir 6y ago

I've been looking for something like this for a very long time. Can it be integrated with systems such as SendGrid? or will it be integrated in the future?

williesleg 6y ago

Finally some hacker news and not political bullshit on my hacker news website.

cafed00d 6y ago

I wonder who the target consumer for this would be. I mean, I get that the target users are probably marketing departments / communications people across the world’s companies. But genuinely curious who’s the end-customer who reads these emails. Email is a strange technology that is only used for _reading words_ more than anything else — office work, receipts, itineraries, bills etc etc. Even the best newsletters, imo, tend to be word-heavy than imagery (such as Candor or Levels.fyi or Chairman Mom). Would be cool if a Mail IDE had a way to tell if the email I’m writing is _engaging_ enough simply by the words alone. Some day perhaps.

smilbandit 6y ago

Any thoughts on integrations with Litmus or Emails on Acid?

rmason 6y ago

Noticed that the video borrows New York Columbo family capo's, Michael Franzese, theme music from his YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+franzese https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+franzes...

xbar 6y ago

I fantasize about using this for one or two of the (many) emails I send per day.

Mooty 6y ago

Is this GrapesJS ;) ?

ct520 6y ago

Pingendo is that you?

blahyawnblah 6y ago

I've been using Zurb's Foundation email stuff. Works great.

geniium 6y ago

Bring me Dreamweaver back

pkulak 6y ago

At first I wasn't going to run a Bash script for installation, but wow, this one is nice. It's just an AppImage, and the script just adds .desktop files and such, and only for the local user. The only suggestion I would make, would be to use/make an Applications folder. I think that's the recommended place to put AppImages. Having it's own dotfolder in my home dir is a bit... cluttering.

marderfarker2 6y ago

This looks like an exact copy of Bootstrap studio.

hakube 6y ago

This is just a rebranded Bootstrap Studio