Mailrox - a web app to quickly build bulletproof HTML emails

I think there's a time and place to use rich HTML emails (and a time and place not to).

For me the time to is newsletters, promotional emails, great-big new feature emails etc. The sort of time you want to showcase something great.

However system emails, like password resets and invitations are times when you need to be efficient. I don't think they should be rich HTML emails.

System emails are not for looking at and enjoying, they're there to make the system run as smoothly as possible. To get the user from A to B.

Mailrox is all about speeding up development. It was a really tricky decision to make the invite email non-fancy, but I think it's the right one. If you see what I mean.

You can currently save, duplicate and override emails and designs so it's easy to upload a new one over some existing slices. However the exact functionality you're talking about (swapping out images in a cell) is coming very soon. (You can pop in a support ticket/idea if there's anything else you'd like to see, I've just put your request in as a new feature request.)

Currently the images are only exportable in the downloads area (they're all neatly packaged up for you!) because image hosting might have been open to abuse, but it's certainly something we're thinking about for the future.

Lots of us don't use mailchimp or constantcontact due not to security but to their privacy policies. Selling every read and click to a group of big-data "associates" (i.e., monetized spyware companies) is questionable customer relations.

This did cross my mind, but I think (I'm not 100% sure) that bulletproof is a highly specialize word. You'd only make this connection if you we're interested in bulletproof hosting. You're the first one to mention it so I think you might just be oversensitive :) It would be interesting to see if lots of other people make this connection.

I must have written 30 different tag lines for the homepage, so I might try split-testing them at some point.

P.S. The homepage tag-line was almost... "Rich HTML email development that isn't like punching yourself in the face."

We've been looking into color automation for exactly this. Ours will be a combination of canvas and server-side.

Server side to do almost exactly what you're saying. Automate the background color picking and even detect if the cell is just a block of color (and set it appropriately). We're doing this server side so it's available to all users, not just users with canvas.

Then on top of that Mailrox could benefit from an canvas based eye-dropper tool for picking out text colors. I hadn't thought of making the system guesstimate the test color but that's a nice idea in addition to a picker.

For us we've found that the workflow for creating a professional HTML email is more often that a marketing/design department create a design and then the web department receive a PSD or TIFF that they have to HTML-ify. I think web apps like yours are really targetted at a different kind of user and workflow where the assumption is that the web department will be designing and buidling the email from scratch within one tool.

The one thing we wanted to avoid with Mailrox was trying to reinvent Photoshop or Illustrator as part of a web app. This means that providing a blank canvas to create an email was never really part of the grand vision - most professional designers are not going to give up their Adobe products without a fight. What we wanted to do was focus on creating a tool that does a really good job of letting you take an exisitng design and turn it in to bulletproof code. All this without actually having to code and faff about with tables, layout and multiple painful trips to tools like Litmus to ensure client compatibility. With Mailrox all you have to do is slice up an image and export it ready for your favourite mailing list app. It's dead easy.

HTML email is a scourge.

Text has to look perfect (or very close to perfect) in every email client. Doing even simple things like line-height require loads of inline CSS, hacks and black magic. So creating a text editor is two big jobs:

1. Getting consistent text across all clients.

2. Then wrapping all this up in an editor.

I just want it to be spot on first time, that's why a text editor isn't in Mailrox at the moment, because it would be a crap rushed one. Rest assured quality text editing is coming. :)

Just out of curiosity how did you get to the non-www url?

...and you're a masochist if you enjoy building HTML emails by hand.

Some e-mails benefit from Hypertext, some don't. Some web pages likewise can be presented in plain text, most benefit from something more.

Don't confuse format with medium.