Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

I receive a lot of newsletters and communiqués, some of which I even signed up for.<p>So, I don&#x27;t know what designers use to receive e-mail, but here in the non-designer &#x2F; 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.<p>So let me tell you:<p>Your picture banners, your &quot;rounded corner buttons&quot;, your main engagement centerpiece that&#x27;s just a picture ... it all ends up being one of those nice 90&#x27;s type beveled empty box we remember from surfing with IE and ISDN.<p>This may be a shock, but it really doesn&#x27;t make your important newsletter look any better. So, if you are not specifically going for nostalgic &quot;bad modem connection&quot; look and feel, maybe ease off the HTML pictures a bit, okay?

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee?<p>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?”<p>Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot?<p>Of course the price&#x2F;value computation is up to y’all and your customers but office365 only costs $10&#x2F;month. Seems tough to value authoring email as higher value than cloud productivity suite.<p>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+&#x2F;month.

HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text&#x2F;html+css, and clients who want can implement it.<p>In theory you could have representations of the message like video&#x2F;mpeg4 and text&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

The developer is super smart , it&#x27;s Bootstrap Studio[0] rebranded as something new.<p>I remember Michael Seibel talking about YC company &quot;launching multiple times&quot; because you shouldn&#x27;t be stopping until you find your product market fit.<p>This time it&#x27;s seems like the right shot , but the pricing is quite high for what is it...<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstrapstudio.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstrapstudio.io&#x2F;</a>

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

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

Hey! I am one of Mail Studio&#x27;s authors. Will be happy to answer any questions.

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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;litmus.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;4990-outlook-2016-1px-horizontal-lines-showing-up-in-the-body" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;litmus.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;4990-outlook-2016-1...</a><p>It is the latest of many issues we’re facing caused by the despicable lack of consistency, especially in Microsoft’s email clients.<p>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.<p>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.

Best of the Fool&#x27;s Day. Next we need IDE for designing DMCA notices.

This looks really neat. I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Still kinda useless, because most users still block (and should block) remote content including images by default.<p>I&#x27;m tired of companies(and users) sending emails with trackers to check if someone has read your email or not.

i would appreciate if they only could send meaningful plain text messages BESIDES the text&#x2F;html bloat they send, not garbage. or do not add text&#x2F;plain at all.<p>i often ancounter emails with multipart&#x2F;alternative containing text&#x2F;html and text&#x2F;plain too but the plain part is<p>1) the HTML source, or<p>2) exists but empty, or in the best case<p>3) something like &quot;see the html part&quot;, or in the worst case<p>4) a seemingly valid text but actually an earlier version of that in the html, or<p>4&#x2F;b) valid text but with template variables not substituted with actual data.

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.<p>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.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstrapstudio.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bootstrapstudio.io</a>

I&#x27;m watching to see if this takes off, and how the developer does. It&#x27;s already at the top of HN, so that&#x27;s a great start.<p>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.

Noticed that the video borrows New York Columbo family capo&#x27;s, Michael Franzese, theme music from his YouTube channel.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=michael+franzese" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=michael+franzes...</a>

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

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.

At first I wasn&#x27;t going to run a Bash script for installation, but wow, this one is nice. It&#x27;s just an AppImage, and the script just adds .desktop files and such, and only for the local user.<p>The only suggestion I would make, would be to use&#x2F;make an Applications folder. I think that&#x27;s the recommended place to put AppImages. Having it&#x27;s own dotfolder in my home dir is a bit... cluttering.

Its very ninche tbh. I think more needs to be done to empower marketers who don&#x27;t really care about HTML.<p>I know the web and email and different but its just crazy how slow email is. Its still 10 years behind stuck using &lt;table&gt; layouts. Just insane.<p>Microsoft for starters should stop with actionable emails and start supportingbasic semantic HTML and CSS3 in all their clients.

Very nice, however:<p>&gt; The designs that you create in Mail Studio are compatible with everything from iOS Mail to Outlook 2007<p>and<p>&gt; 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.<p>are mutually exclusive.

I don&#x27;t mean to be harsh but that video is awful. You&#x27;re moving the screencast around while I&#x27;m trying to watch what is happening on the screen. And for no reason other than to just move the screencast around.

Isn&#x27;t this just Bootstrap Studio, but with less features? The UI is identical.

I&#x27;ve been using Zurb&#x27;s Foundation email stuff. Works great.

I&#x27;ve been looking for something like this for a very long time.<p>Can it be integrated with systems such as SendGrid? or will it be integrated in the future?

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

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

Any thoughts on integrations with Litmus or Emails on Acid?

This looks like an exact copy of Bootstrap studio.

I wonder who the target consumer for this would be. I mean, I get that the target users are probably marketing departments &#x2F; communications people across the world’s companies.<p>But genuinely curious who’s the end-customer who reads these emails.<p>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).<p>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.

This is just a rebranded Bootstrap Studio

Pingendo is that you?

Is this GrapesJS ;) ?

Bring me Dreamweaver back

An email user&#x27;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&#x27;s appropriate. Images aren&#x27;t always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default.<p>Why not have just text in paragraphs with hyperlinks? It&#x27;d force you to write good copy, sure, but also it&#x27;s more likely it&#x27;ll get read.<p>A complex layout often detracts from your message. Especially now with web-based clients implementing &#x27;dark mode&#x27; and darkening your layouts, meaning you have less control over what the end-user sees.<p>(Apologies if this is off-topic. I don&#x27;t mean to denigrate the work designers do, I just feel it&#x27;s more appropriate on the actual web rather than in email.)

Best open source alternative?

No.<p>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.<p>I won&#x27;t see any of it anyways. HTML-designed mails go straight to my bin...