6 ms·

Transactional HTML Email Templates

271 points by twakefield 12y ago

patio11 12y ago
These are incredible. Thanks. Elaboration: You can buy email templates on ThemeForest for ~$2 and they'll be prettier but it is very, very rare that they are actually as thoroughly tested as these are. Source: The guy who deals with bug reports like "It's unreadable on [insert a device that neither the designer nor the email sender owned]" way more often than he'd like to. Fun story, which I'm telling you because it is a fun story and not because I want to scare you off using Themeforest designs: I once bought, and promptly shipped, a transactional email template. It happened to include a reproducible remote crash against at least three major versions of Outlook. (After finding this out the hard way, I reported it to Microsoft's security, which looked into it for a few months before deciding "That sucks but it doesn't look like remote code execution is actually exploitable so phew dodged a bullet there, didn't we.")
- bluetidepro 12y ago
  > "You can buy email templates on ThemeForest for ~$2 and they'll be prettier but it is very, very rare that they are actually as thoroughly tested as these are." This is an amazing resource, but I don't want you to over generalize the templates at Themeforest. All the templates on that site clearly say what they have been tested in, and what clients they work in. (screenshot of the product detail sidebar: http://bluetide.pro/BU4q/1KDfhjBF http://bluetide.pro/BU4q/1KDfhjBF). I've never ever found that info to be wrong when it says they work in the said applications. I think Themeforest does a great job with their vetting process to make sure the templates on the site are almost 100% accurate in the info. (It may be worth reporting to Themeforest that wasn't the case on a template if you have been burned before.)
  - pyre 12y ago
    One thing that it's missing is which version of (e.g.) Outlook it's been tested in.
- ssiddharth 12y ago
  Hey there, Patrick! I work at ThemeForest/Envato and I'm happy to look into the issues here. Could you email me the link to the item in question? sid at envato dot com. Thanks!
SuperKlaus 12y ago
Directly on the heels of "Open Source Email Templates (sendwithus.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154646 Gotta love competition.
- twakefield 12y ago
  Seems more like complimentary rather than competition. We don't really have a dog in the fight as to which templates our customers use. Just trying to be helpful. Maybe we should do a pull request to get these templates on the sendwithus repo.
  - bvanvugt 12y ago
    Absolutely, happy to join forces :) More excellent templates for everyone!
    - Killswitch 12y ago
      I love seeing essentially two competitors come together to deliver quality to their customers and not try to dog at each other.
      - fraserharris 12y ago
        SendWithUs (transactional email GUI for marketers) integrates with Mailgun (email delivery API) and are not competitive by and large.
- d0100 12y ago
  I just finished an app that uses the template system from mailchimp's email templates. Now there are other formats, with great quality templates, 3 and counting... Oh well.
- wise_young_man 12y ago
  That was just a few days ago posted on here. I don't imagine they threw all of this together that fast, probably have been working on it for a long time and knew people might say that the longer they waited to release. I also wouldn't consider open source projects as competition, there is room for everyone to work together for a common goal and they compliment each other. Some like Bootstrap and some like Foundation. Some like Rails (Ruby) and some like Laravel (PHP). Overall it's better to have more resources than less or even none. Props to all. For those who don't know, MailChimp also has a set of email templates available. https://github.com/mailchimp/Email-Blueprints https://github.com/mailchimp/Email-Blueprints
encoderer 12y ago
These are great. I've been thinking a lot lately about HTML email vs Text. I used to snicker at people who wanted plaintext, thinking them luddites. But I've had some experience on the other side of this lately with our SaaS startup, Cronitor. I've learned that a plainly worded and concise plaintext email can be a very powerful tool.
ferrantim 12y ago
Thanks Mailgun! These are really awesome.
sundance0 12y ago
These are great, and really simple to use. Already adapted for my latest project! Also, if you didn't catch it in there: the [premailer][1] library is awesome, and helps make email templates more manageable (use CSS/LESS/SCSS styles like normal, then run your HTML email through premailer before shipping and it'll inline everything for you). I use the Python library with Django to preflight emails before sending. Works like a charm! [1]: https://github.com/peterbe/premailer/tree/master https://github.com/peterbe/premailer/tree/master Also available in Ruby, Node, and PHP flavors
- pdenya 12y ago
  Premailer is amazing. Saves me a huge amount of trouble regularly. For one thing you can just remove the external stylesheet reference to see how it degrades instead of s/style=/ignorestyle=/g or similar.
- e0 12y ago
  Why is it better to use inline CSS here? Isn't inline CSS usually frowned-upon?
  - 23andwalnut 12y ago
    Email clients strip external css and often the style tag. Therefore you have to use inline css to style html emails.
  - sundance0 12y ago
    Most browser-based email clients (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) strip out the head and body tags from HTML emails. You never really know what's going to be removed, so the safest thing is to inline all of your styles.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    > Isn't inline CSS usually frowned-upon? Yes, but not in the 1990s, which is the era HTML email finds itself stuck in.
  - mtdewcmu 12y ago
callmeed 12y ago
These are really great. If anyone is interested in collaborating, I'm thinking about converting these (and the SendWithUs ones) into ActionMailer layouts and views for use in Rails apps.
lelf 12y ago
Please don't forget to include text/plain multipart/alternative while you are at it.
jimktrains2 12y ago
For those of you, like me wondering what a transactional email is: http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-is-transactional-email/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-is-transactional-email/ > So what is transactional email? Coming from a MailChimp > state of mind, you might simply think of it as "anything > that isn’t bulk". Basically, it is email sent to an > individual based on some action. It could be: > > * an action they took directly > * an action they were the target of or, > * perhaps even inaction on their part
jasonwen 12y ago
This is really awesome. Just needed this. 3 years ago. Sometimes I really think why things are so obvious but takes so long before someone realises and take action. Thanks a lot for the resource!
mendelk 12y ago
For those that need more complex designs, there's also responsive email templates from Zurb[0]. [0] http://zurb.com/playground/responsive-email-templates http://zurb.com/playground/responsive-email-templates
orliesaurus 12y ago
sweet!
michaelmior 12y ago
Here's an alternative[0] from Sendwithus worth checking out. [0] https://github.com/sendwithus/templates https://github.com/sendwithus/templates
pearknob 12y ago
A side note: I really love Mailgun as a service :)
pionar 12y ago
The MIT license worries me. Does that mean, if I use it, I have to embed the license somewhere in every email, as that's how the MIT license reads to me.
- akerl_ 12y ago
  No, the MIT license is not viral, and even if it was, emails created from an MIT-licensed thing would be no less "derivative" than documents typed inside OpenOffice.

271 points by twakefield 12y ago

These are incredible. Thanks. Elaboration: You can buy email templates on ThemeForest for ~$2 and they'll be prettier but it is very, very rare that they are actually as thoroughly tested as these are. Source: The guy who deals with bug reports like "It's unreadable on [insert a device that neither the designer nor the email sender owned]" way more often than he'd like to. Fun story, which I'm telling you because it is a fun story and not because I want to scare you off using Themeforest designs: I once bought, and promptly shipped, a transactional email template. It happened to include a reproducible remote crash against at least three major versions of Outlook. (After finding this out the hard way, I reported it to Microsoft's security, which looked into it for a few months before deciding "That sucks but it doesn't look like remote code execution is actually exploitable so phew dodged a bullet there, didn't we.")

bluetidepro 12y ago
> "You can buy email templates on ThemeForest for ~$2 and they'll be prettier but it is very, very rare that they are actually as thoroughly tested as these are." This is an amazing resource, but I don't want you to over generalize the templates at Themeforest. All the templates on that site clearly say what they have been tested in, and what clients they work in. (screenshot of the product detail sidebar: http://bluetide.pro/BU4q/1KDfhjBF http://bluetide.pro/BU4q/1KDfhjBF). I've never ever found that info to be wrong when it says they work in the said applications. I think Themeforest does a great job with their vetting process to make sure the templates on the site are almost 100% accurate in the info. (It may be worth reporting to Themeforest that wasn't the case on a template if you have been burned before.)
- pyre 12y ago
  One thing that it's missing is which version of (e.g.) Outlook it's been tested in.
ssiddharth 12y ago
Hey there, Patrick! I work at ThemeForest/Envato and I'm happy to look into the issues here. Could you email me the link to the item in question? sid at envato dot com. Thanks!

SuperKlaus 12y ago

Directly on the heels of "Open Source Email Templates (sendwithus.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8154646 Gotta love competition.

twakefield 12y ago
Seems more like complimentary rather than competition. We don't really have a dog in the fight as to which templates our customers use. Just trying to be helpful. Maybe we should do a pull request to get these templates on the sendwithus repo.
- bvanvugt 12y ago
  Absolutely, happy to join forces :) More excellent templates for everyone!
  - Killswitch 12y ago
    I love seeing essentially two competitors come together to deliver quality to their customers and not try to dog at each other.
    - fraserharris 12y ago
      SendWithUs (transactional email GUI for marketers) integrates with Mailgun (email delivery API) and are not competitive by and large.
d0100 12y ago
I just finished an app that uses the template system from mailchimp's email templates. Now there are other formats, with great quality templates, 3 and counting... Oh well.
wise_young_man 12y ago
That was just a few days ago posted on here. I don't imagine they threw all of this together that fast, probably have been working on it for a long time and knew people might say that the longer they waited to release. I also wouldn't consider open source projects as competition, there is room for everyone to work together for a common goal and they compliment each other. Some like Bootstrap and some like Foundation. Some like Rails (Ruby) and some like Laravel (PHP). Overall it's better to have more resources than less or even none. Props to all. For those who don't know, MailChimp also has a set of email templates available. https://github.com/mailchimp/Email-Blueprints https://github.com/mailchimp/Email-Blueprints

encoderer 12y ago

These are great. I've been thinking a lot lately about HTML email vs Text. I used to snicker at people who wanted plaintext, thinking them luddites. But I've had some experience on the other side of this lately with our SaaS startup, Cronitor. I've learned that a plainly worded and concise plaintext email can be a very powerful tool.

ferrantim 12y ago

Thanks Mailgun! These are really awesome.

sundance0 12y ago

These are great, and really simple to use. Already adapted for my latest project! Also, if you didn't catch it in there: the [premailer][1] library is awesome, and helps make email templates more manageable (use CSS/LESS/SCSS styles like normal, then run your HTML email through premailer before shipping and it'll inline everything for you). I use the Python library with Django to preflight emails before sending. Works like a charm! [1]: https://github.com/peterbe/premailer/tree/master https://github.com/peterbe/premailer/tree/master Also available in Ruby, Node, and PHP flavors

pdenya 12y ago
Premailer is amazing. Saves me a huge amount of trouble regularly. For one thing you can just remove the external stylesheet reference to see how it degrades instead of s/style=/ignorestyle=/g or similar.
e0 12y ago
Why is it better to use inline CSS here? Isn't inline CSS usually frowned-upon?
- 23andwalnut 12y ago
  Email clients strip external css and often the style tag. Therefore you have to use inline css to style html emails.
- sundance0 12y ago
  Most browser-based email clients (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) strip out the head and body tags from HTML emails. You never really know what's going to be removed, so the safest thing is to inline all of your styles.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Isn't inline CSS usually frowned-upon? Yes, but not in the 1990s, which is the era HTML email finds itself stuck in.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago

callmeed 12y ago

These are really great. If anyone is interested in collaborating, I'm thinking about converting these (and the SendWithUs ones) into ActionMailer layouts and views for use in Rails apps.

lelf 12y ago

Please don't forget to include text/plain multipart/alternative while you are at it.

jimktrains2 12y ago

For those of you, like me wondering what a transactional email is: http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-is-transactional-email/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/what-is-transactional-email/ > So what is transactional email? Coming from a MailChimp > state of mind, you might simply think of it as "anything > that isn’t bulk". Basically, it is email sent to an > individual based on some action. It could be: > > * an action they took directly > * an action they were the target of or, > * perhaps even inaction on their part

jasonwen 12y ago

This is really awesome. Just needed this. 3 years ago. Sometimes I really think why things are so obvious but takes so long before someone realises and take action. Thanks a lot for the resource!

mendelk 12y ago

For those that need more complex designs, there's also responsive email templates from Zurb[0]. [0] http://zurb.com/playground/responsive-email-templates http://zurb.com/playground/responsive-email-templates

orliesaurus 12y ago

sweet!

michaelmior 12y ago

Here's an alternative[0] from Sendwithus worth checking out. [0] https://github.com/sendwithus/templates https://github.com/sendwithus/templates

pearknob 12y ago

A side note: I really love Mailgun as a service :)

pionar 12y ago

The MIT license worries me. Does that mean, if I use it, I have to embed the license somewhere in every email, as that's how the MIT license reads to me.

akerl_ 12y ago
No, the MIT license is not viral, and even if it was, emails created from an MIT-licensed thing would be no less "derivative" than documents typed inside OpenOffice.