Show HN: Sendune – open-source HTML email designer

Oh wow, nice, thanks for the MIT License!

No malicious intent here but the post says it was submitted by you.

What exactly were you "not expecting"?

Looks very nice. I'm curious about "no mjml" -- I've worked with authoring tools in related domains and found that separating the serialization format from the output format has some benefits. It manifested in needing to store editing concerns like "this element is locked" in the HTML when it had no business being in the HTML output.

Very nice work and very well deserved the front page #2 spot! Thank you!

How did you reliably determine what works and what doesn’t in “untold combination of os/desktop/mobile clients“? Is there a description of that somewhere?

So plain text, not even links with <a>?

I would love first class support for some limited subset of markdown (same for browsers actually).

Talking to non-tech people means you're going to be copy-pasting screenshots and replying in blue text next to their bullet points that was written in black text.

To say nothing of legitimate marketing emails (which many people rely on to get coupons and deals) that has to feature pictures and the like.

That's why I am using aerc so that even HTML mails are presented as text in my terminal.

Another problem are mails that don't have the TXT part and *only* HTML.

You're being nice.

I plain cringed when I saw the headline. This sounded like a tool designed by some evil entity to bring destruction upon the World.

there's an export HTML functionality. you can use this to save templates once you embed this in your project.

it has not evolved much. and i believe that's a good thing. this is the reason why emails from 20 years ago look the same even if you open them today. given the short life of everything on the internet, email is a wonderful thing.

Email clients and servers have not evolved

I've long wished for something like Markdown for email, but something that can actually be standardised and doesn't suffer so much under HTML's influence.

I guess Google tries/tried with AMP but it's not that and I doubt they have the resilience to keep the effort up for decades for it to catch on.

We still have to use outdated layout / css techniques because some email clients (cough outlook) only support a limited set of HTML/CSS features, and they seem to have no plans to want to make things easier for those who send html emails.

See https://www.caniemail.com/scoreboard/ and take note of what's at the bottom of that list.

The argument for this I always get is security. Since email is so critical reducing the surface area of html/css supported somehow makes it secure. I...don't really buy it.

Is this a genuine question? I dont want to be rude but I dont understand how are you asking this?

Just in case it is a genuine question:

- This is a tool for designing/creating emails - they say in the title of this post "Open source HTML email designer"

- Resend is a tool for sending emails: "Deliver transactional and marketing emails at scale" this is from the hero of resend homepage

I dont know any of them, just opened the Resend website and read the hero and read the description of the post you are commenting.

although the name says 'drag and drop', it's not truly that. you click on any column in the designer and then select the component (heading, text, image, etc) in the left panel. you can then move components up and down using the arrows.

we found this approach simpler than drag and drop, especially when designing long emails.

let me know if drag and drop is something thats an absolute for you. we can bring it back.

I think it's distinctly uncool that this was published as open source. OP should charge money from all the swines that will use the software, including people like me.

You can use HTML with plain text fallback. That's still the vast majority of marketing/form emails.

HTML works fine, and adds important features like formatting text and links. HTML without images is ideal, as images are often blocked (as you mention).

I prefer plaintext too, but for a marketing email (ie, "confirm your account") consumers will think it feels "off" or unpolished given what they are used to. It will likely lead to churn. Clients can opt to view plaintext if they prefer.

Edit: also it's a bit funny the page you link, useplaintext.email, uses lots of HTML formatting.

My sentiments are totally with this comment, however as others have pointed out you can deliver both via plaintext fallback

And in defense of html emails: for marketing missions there's nothing like a nice piece of visual design -- layout, color, possibly some type design, but not necessarily images since folks like me turn them off because of tracking -- to get attention and drive interest. Also, html can allow for column layout that could keep email content shorter than plain text version

I would wager that the vast majority of people consume email via Gmail, Outlook, or Mail (Apple). You might have the holdovers like my parents who still use Thunderbird (because in early 2000's that was ideal of POP3 accounts, and they're used to it, and that's just how it will remain). All of those clients display HTML by default, and all marketing / account-related / branded emails are HTML emails. Every single reason cited in your link for choosing plaintext are irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of internet users worldwide. We could definitely productively debate the ethics surrounding marketing initiatives and data privacy, but at the end of the day, to me, plaintext destroys most of the functionality that makes email so useful.

This is not a good Show HN comment. There's nothing these people can do with this feedback, and it's litigating a tired internet trope. It's 2024, people overwhelmingly use HTML email, and this is not a thread intended to investigate whether that's a good thing or not.

Literally everyone that sends marketing emails uses HTML (from political campaigns to video games, to movies, to shopping). You'd be putting yourself at a serious competitive disadvantage if you started sending plaintext (not to mention that it would look spammy, if anything).

I work in this space with hundreds of clients and tens of thousands of email templates and literally zero use plaintext as the primary templating option for marketing emails. None of them.

you can design absolutely anything with the HTML editor - invoices included.

Because someone keeps commenting and immediately deleting their comments in reply to this: MJML is a tool to essentially “fix” email, which essentially has to work around out-of-date clients and incomplete HTML specs.

If it feels out of date, it’s because HTML email itself is out of date.

got it. plain text fall back is on our todo list.

> knows the devilry involved

You're being too kind if anything. Whilst trying to bash HTML emails into something acceptable I questioned if my life wouldn't better have been spent as a monk in Tibet.

You can set an <mj-class> at the top of the file for a given design format to simplify your code. So in your example, if you did:

<mj-class name="typebox" padding-bottom="0px" padding-top="0px" padding="10px 25px">

<mj-class name="paragraph" color="#55575d" align="left" font-family="Arial, sans-serif" font-size="13px" line-height="22px">

That would allow you to simplify your callbacks to

<mj-text mj-class="paragraph typebox">

You can also set CSS classes as well if you need something outside the MJML spec for some reason (which would potentially cover some of your cross-platform concerns).

MJML also integrates well with other languages. For example, I use a Craft CMS integration to pull data in via Twig to build complete templates directly from my CMS; there’s also an integration with Eleventy.

Because at the time web browsers were taking off and web based mail services (Hotmail yahoo etc) were taking off. Back in that time the alternative to html was Tex.

Why do we still boot to 16-bit protected mode to launch any OS on x64? shrug but you are welcome to move that mountain :)

I just want one thread about HTML email to not be a re-litigation of this point. It’s been around for a quarter-century at this point. It’s well-established. It has plenty of warts, but it’s not going away.

There are better ways to push the ball forward than this recurrent frustration over something that is so broadly used. A key one would be to improve support for making divs display properly in HTML emails, so the format could be more accessible, for example, as well as to look into ways to push corporations away from outdated email clients. Finally, a way to sandbox emails to help minimize concerns around risky designs would be ideal.

AMP is a dirty word around these parts, but Google’s AMP for Email did some of these things.

I don’t know what that would look like, but there has to be a better way to expel our energy than just being frustrated about something that’s unlikely to change.

There was an attempt to standardise what looks like an HTML-subset for formatted emails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text

But unfortunately it wasn't very popular.

OP should have used the patterns from Cerberus: https://github.com/emailmonday/Cerberus

Yes, this designer does that. please test it out.

Same, I was even surprised because I didn’t find anything.