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Open Source Email Templates
- wesleycyu 12y agoAwesome responsive email templates. More info here: https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about
- mrmch 12y agosendwithus cofounder; we've had a template gallery internally in the product since launch, but we felt that these templates were something that everyone should be able to use. We didn't want to launch "just another template gallery", like many others, so we've made these open source. Contribute a pull request on github[0], we'll merge it, run it through Litmus and make sure it's still responsive. You can read about it on the 'about' page[1] [0] https://github.com/sendwithus/templates https://github.com/sendwithus/templates [1] https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about
- j_s 12y agoAwesome, I think you just became the Bootstrap of email by default!
- mrmch 12y agoThanks, that's super flattering for the whole sendwithus team!
- guynamedloren 12y agoSee Zurb Ink, which is also open sourced, but might be a bit closer to Bootstrap as it also has a framework. http://zurb.com/ink/ http://zurb.com/ink/
- tjaspers 12y agoThat looks pretty good, thanks for the share.
- eltondegeneres 12y agoThese templates are really nice, but the license choice confuses me a bit. Apache 2.0 requires attribution, but there aren't license headers in any of the templates. How should I properly attribute sendwithus when using this template?
- mrmch 12y agoThe way we intend this is that if you redistribute the templates (say you host your own template gallery, or put them together as a zip you send people), then attribution would be nice. If you're using the templates to send email, no attribution is required.
- jensC 12y agoThanks for clarifying this.
- rodriguezcommaj 12y agoGreat work, Matt. I think you guys did a great job with these, especially having multiple layouts for each template to handle different use cases. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that one layout works for every situation—it's nice to see you guys helping to remedy that misconception. Chuffed to see you using Litmus, too!
- mrmch 12y agoThanks! This was a team effort, not just me :) We like the idea of "purpose driven" templates, and that's why we've designed that way. Who thinks "I want a 3 column email template"? Most people think "I need to send a notification email". That's what we tried to design for.
- Angostura 12y ago> Who thinks "I want a 3 column email template"? People who send out monthly e-mail newsletters and the like. Sadly, that's a use-case that isn't really included. Other than that - very nice approach.
- dehmlow 12y agoAh you guys are the bomb! I might have to fork some of your templates for our year 2005 looking emails..
- wuliwong 12y agoThanks for this, I have been looking for email templates for a little while.
- hobarrera 12y agoThe "alt" attributes on images (at least on the few templates I saw), are pretty bad. For example, here [0] all the social icons have an alt of "social icon". Have you guys even tried looking at these templates on a non-html email client? Clearly not. [0] https://github.com/sendwithus/templates/blob/master/templates/narrative/invoice.html https://github.com/sendwithus/templates/blob/master/template...
- eli 12y agoThey are much less fully fleshed out, but Zurb Ink has some sample templates along with a whole system for responsive email design: http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php
- mrmch 12y agoThe Zurb Ink templates are great! We use them as a base for some of our templates as well. The process of going from the Zurb template to something you might want to actually use often means people break the responsive elements of the template -- something we're hoping to avoid with this template gallery.
- eli 12y agoYup definitely agree with that. I think Ink might be the future of email design, bUt it's still pretty rough in real world use today. I'll take a closer look at these templates. Thanks.
- rodriguezcommaj 12y agoInk is cool. There are a surprising number of templates out there now, too. Brian Graves has a great site of resources with a template section at http://responsiveemailresources.com/ http://responsiveemailresources.com/ I also released one based on the template we use at Litmus to accompany an article in A List Apart. Article - http://alistapart.com/article/can-email-be-responsive http://alistapart.com/article/can-email-be-responsive Template - https://github.com/alistapart/salted https://github.com/alistapart/salted
- rquantz 12y agoI can't tell you how many times I've wanted something like this. The pain of writing and testing html email is pretty huge, and the only people doing an even halfway decent job with them seem to be the proprietary email campaign companies, and until now they don't seem interested in making them as accessible as this. Plus, these templates look pretty slick.
- troymcginnis 12y agoGlad that you appreciate them! Feel free to use them or contribute to them to your hearts content :)
- programminggeek 12y agoYou know what's funny? Often the highest converting and best user experience emails are... just text and links. Yep, all the branded shenanigans and responsive mumbojumbo doesn't necessarily beat just sending an email in its native form. As it turns out, most of the logos and branding are self serving and nobody cares. Many of the most profitable email lists on the internet have no style at all, are long form text, have plain blue links, and they make millions of dollars in sales. This is a cool project, but don't forget to treat email in its native form.
- mrmch 12y agoWe always encourage people to A/B test plain text versus HTML, and from the results seen it's entirely dependent on the audience. If you're emailing developers, keep it clean/plain. Many consumers appreciate if an email "looks/feels like the website".
- troymcginnis 12y agoTotally excellent point! It really depends on who your customers are, what your product is, and what your email is about. We encourage everyone to experiment with your ideas and see what works best for your customers :) I think you'd be surprised to see how different customers respond to different styles and types of email.
- prostoalex 12y agoConversion is content-dependent. What works for a link of the day newsletter won't work for someone like fab.com
- wuliwong 12y agoFor me, simply the development of brand recognition alone is reason enough to want to include a nice, visible logo and some aesthetic design in the email. I'm not entirely focused on "conversions" in email. It is part of a much larger user experience where everywhere customers interact with something I've made, I want it to communicate a cohesive message and also imprint my brand into their mind. Obviously, you should degrade to plain text well. But maybe what seems obvious to me, isn't.
- ramoq 12y agoExcellent job. For those interested in just seeing (no source) really well designed emails can alwasy check out: http://reallygoodemails.com/ http://reallygoodemails.com/
- nichodges 12y agoThese are great. I'm a week off shipping a product that is primarily delivered via email, to C-suite'ers. Most of these people check all email on their phone, so these are an amazing help in shipping the MVP.
- thehal84 12y agoVery nice! Just a shame most of these will not work with gmail since it blocks internal style sheets.
- mrmch 12y agoThat's why all the CSS is inlined for you as well :)
- thehal84 12y agoNice, i missed that while glancing at it on git. I've starred the repo and appreciate the contributions everyone has made to it.
- kronik3r 12y agoi solved the problem by inelining the css, by using the Zurb inliner http://zurb.com/ink/inliner.php http://zurb.com/ink/inliner.php.
- Aldo_MX 12y agoThis is amazing, although I can't help but feel skeptical every time I read the word responsive next to the word e-mail considering only Thunderbird and Apple Mail speak responsive. Sadly, email design is like travelling to a twisted dimension. The most effective markup for layouts are the dreaded tables, the most effective way to style your markup is with inline styles, and the most used email client (Microsoft Outlook 2007~13) has an engine exponentially worse than Trident from Internet Explorer 6[1]. And don't get me started with Android/Gmail because Google seems devoted in beating Microsoft with the worst experience for email design. [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201(v=office.12).aspx#Word2007MailHTMLandCSS_Introduction http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201(v=office.12...
- troymcginnis 12y agoIt's a wonderfully painful reminder of what the web was like back in the 90's - isn't it?! Hopefully these open source templates will help lessen the pain and encourage more people to contribute and create their own awesome templates!
- Aldo_MX 12y agoI can guarantee you that the web from the 90's was <BLINK><FONT COLOR="#00FF00">less frustrating</FONT></BLINK>. But at least there are some nice tools[1] that lessen the pain :) [1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/inlinestyler https://pypi.python.org/pypi/inlinestyler
- madeofpalk 12y agoI tried using python inlinesytler not too long ago, and found it didnt work well preserving some styles like media queries. The only thing that I found worked reliably was juice[1], which is a node.js library. [1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/juice https://github.com/andrewrk/juice
- jmtame 12y agoI don't know man. Writing custom XmlHttpRequest methods for each browser was <MARQUEE>pretty bad!</MARQUEE>.
- JoshTriplett 12y agoIf you build emails based on these, please make sure you send them multipart/alternative with a text/plain version as well. And in particular, make sure that text/plain version isn't just "go read the HTML", or worse a copy of the HTML complete with tags.
- danieltillett 12y agoGreat suggestion. You would think this would be built into the templates.
- wuliwong 12y agoThey are open source, so...
- sah88 12y agoMail Chimp has a tool for this. http://templates.mailchimp.com/resources/html-to-text/ http://templates.mailchimp.com/resources/html-to-text/
- adhsu01 12y agoThis is great. Thanks a lot for sharing. We're working on html emails for our own project and it's shocking how arcane and backwards this entire thing is. Hopefully these templates will save us a lot of time.
- nnnn 12y agoThanks, just what I needed at the right time :) Was going to settle for plain text emails for this weekend release. But after looking at the templates I think I will have to generate mime multipart for this release. Ceo & customers will appreciate it. Don't know if these http://www.bchanx.com/logos-in-pure-css http://www.bchanx.com/logos-in-pure-css will display in the email.
- danieltillett 12y agoIn my endless fight with Microsoft’s worse than useless spam filters (my how I hate hotmail and her ugly sisters), how does using a common template like this affect the false positive junk mail rate? On this topic does anyone have any trick suggestion beyond the obvious (spf, dkim, etc) to keep emails away from Microsoft’s junk mail filter?
- erichurkman 12y agoAnecdotal, but I have had better luck sending through an email provider to Hotmail (and Outlook.com and friends) rather than setting up my own outbound SMTP. I've used both Mailgun and Mandrill – of course, make sure you set up SPF and DKIM with the provider, too.
- danieltillett 12y agoYes I already do this - still doesn’t solve the hotmail junk filter hell. The emails I send are not newsletter, just invoices and the like. They go through fine to gmail, yahoo, etc, but for no known reason Microsoft’s useless filters marks them as spam. Of course the average hotmail user never thinks to look in their junk mail folder no matter how many times they are told :(
- mrmch 12y agoHotmail has a dedicated abuse team, why not try getting in touch? There's no reason a legitimate invoice email shouldn't be getting through!
- danieltillett 12y agoI have tried this and never got a response as to why. I have a feeling that their abuse team doesn’t even know what their filters are trigged on.
- frik 12y agoInteresting, I had no issues with GMail and Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com but with Yahoo. A handful of Yahoo user that mark their own registration email as junk is enough that Yahoo add the domain to their junk filter. It doesn't help that Yahoo has a very prominent "Spam" button in their UI (in GMail & Outlook it's on a drop-down menu).
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- _fluffy 12y agoWhen I saw "open source mail templates" I thought it'd be things like ways of insulting people who report bugs or provide patches, or calling everyone idiots for not wrapping their plain-text emails at 72 columns, or whatever.
- _asciiker_ 12y agovery misleading title for a commercial solution.
- cbr 12y agoIt's under the Apache license and all; what more do you want?