Mailrox - a web app to quickly build bulletproof HTML emails

https://www.mailrox.com/

by vacipr • 14 years ago

83 48 14 years ago

mailrox.com

timkrins• 14 years ago

great, the only task I enjoyed in my old office job will soon be unnecessary... ;)

smickie10• 14 years ago

Not unnecessary. Just easier!

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

ams6110• 14 years ago

HTML is for web pages. Text is for emails.

robert_mygengo• 14 years ago

Developer-centric opinions are for Hacker News.

jammmuel• 14 years ago

That's not a very helpful comment, considering the context of this app.

ErikGelderblom• 14 years ago

Short sighted comments are for Reddit

RobAley• 14 years ago

HTML is for anything that would benefit from Hypertext. Text is for everything else.

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.

smickie10• 14 years ago

Hi, I'm the founder of Mailrox. Wasn't expecting a HN post this soon, I accidentally got tweeted by Smashing Magazine. Happy to answer any questions you've got.

TobbenTM• 14 years ago

FYI: The "Is Mailrox the tool for you?" thing does not work in IE9 nor Opera 12.

smickie10• 14 years ago

Cheers. It's a jquery animation at the moment scaling the image. I'm going to move it over to some nice CSS translate3d soon for smoother movement (and a static design for IE).

13rules• 14 years ago

Really, really slick! Nice job. Great move having an example design ready-to-go so that new users can play around with it. Very easy to use!

diggan• 14 years ago

I get a SSL-error when visiting the site... But yey, more HTML-emails incoming! [/sarcasm]

smickie10• 14 years ago

That's on the url without www, check out with https://www.mailrox.com/ and it's safe. (but it will be fixed on the non-www soon).

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

romland• 14 years ago

Maybe he did the same as I did. I had logged in, and then simply wanted to go back to front page and figured just removing 'app' of the URL would do the trick.

That is, I did not click any links. :)

jeromeparadis• 14 years ago

Just permanently redirect requests that are missing a prefix to www.mailrox.com. Problem solved.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Congratulations!

I'm old. The title word "bulletproof" has some strong negative connotations for me. Are you aware of the links between that word and people providing unsolicited bulk email? Is that link still strong, or am I being oversensitive? (I'm aware you're using it in a different context; "bulletproof" here meaning "will work in many different email clients".)

The site looks nice, so good luck!

smickie10• 14 years ago

Thanks!

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."

rjsamson• 14 years ago

I actually think that "punching yourself in the face" tagline is pretty awesome - to me that's what HTML email development often feels like - I'll definitely be giving Mailrox a try this weekend!

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Thanks, I did think I was just having a knee-jerk reaction. :-)

tomwalsham2• 14 years ago

It was my first association as well, but I assumed it was used in a jokey linkbait fashion, rather than trying to trade off the reputation of McColo ;)

Always great to see new tools in the email space - would love to get an invite to check out the system and potential integrations.

illdave• 14 years ago

Congratulations on launching! Site design is great and the service looks really useful - great job, and good luck.

fooandbarify2• 14 years ago

Oh my God. Thank you for this. Please ignore any sarcasm/negativity; this is so helpful. I was just in the process of building almost this exact same thing for a client, but kept putting it off--partly because I couldn't believe it didn't already exist. Now it does! (For anyone wondering what it's good for, HTML e-mails are a requirement for any non-hacker oriented marketing endeavour and lots of companies are unable to use ie. MailChimp due to ie. security policy or just legacy CRMs.)

Please tell me that I (or ideally, a designer) will be able to save it at the "chopped up" stage so that the kind old ladies who work for my client will only have to click pictures to switch them and type in boxes to change that. Also, do you host the images too?

smickie10• 14 years ago

Thanks. I was in exactly the same position as you, I looked for ages for a web app chops up images and writes HTML but there was nothing. So I built Mailrox.

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.

pconf• 14 years ago

"lots of companies are unable to use ie. MailChimp due to ie. security policy"

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.

sync• 14 years ago

Looks like a great product.

One thing: the invite email isn't an HTML email? Why wouldn't you use your own product to showcase how great it is?

Edit: Green vs. blue slices is super confusing. Ideally you would have one slice type and figure out another way of specifying slice width. Perhaps a simple drag to extend the slice as you're adding it?

smickie10• 14 years ago

Good question. A few people have asked this.

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.

aeroevan• 14 years ago

You can use mime types to send both HTML and plain text so that the receiver can choose which to view based on the mail client preference. Some of us still like to use mutt or (al)pine for mail and either have to render html in w3m or something if text is not also included.

brittohalloran• 14 years ago

I agree with your premise that password resets and system emails for a typical app shouldn't be HTML, but for you I really think they should be. It's your whole product and a perfect opportunity. If I get a really sharp clean welcome email or password reset, etc... I'm much more likely subconsciously associate your app with beautiful emails.

biot• 14 years ago

As it will be the first time people see your product's output, the welcome email (and every other email you send) is a promotional email where you want to showcase something great.

mnutt• 14 years ago

This is very cool, and I have a suggestion for an enhancement: you're hosting the sliced up images yourself, so you should be able to load them into a canvas element and analyze the colors. If the user switches to "solid color" or "custom html", you can set the background color to the most common color along the border of the region. You could even set the default text color to the brightest/darkest color within the region as well.

smickie10• 14 years ago

Thanks, great idea.

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.

nyodeneD• 14 years ago

I could see myself using this if it had some basic text formatting options for cells, i.e. colour and font size.

smickie10• 14 years ago

This is a tricky tool to create and is currently in development.

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. :)

fooandbarify2• 14 years ago

+1 on this feature request! It would be even more valuable to me than the image swap/image hosting features I mentioned. I obviously can't speak for other users, but my ideal use case would be setting this up for a client and then letting them fill in the blanks themselves for each new e-mail, so fancy formatting could be set up ahead of time--the clients just want to edit text and have the paragraphs inserted automatically "without all that HTML stuff" :)

nshankar• 14 years ago

incidentally, I just got this: https://github.com/seanpowell/Email-Boilerplate. Perfect for hackers who would not take ready tools.

rjzzleep• 14 years ago

Mailsux, but mailrox helps in making it suck a little less.

Man I remember having to buy html templates that looked close to what I wanted just so I could make sure that the one html email we would send, would work in all sorts of shitty email clients.

Very much appreciated, by whomever needs HTML mails in their app I reckon.

rsync• 14 years ago

Which is nobody.

HTML email is a scourge.

backwardm2• 14 years ago

rsync -q

I consider HTML email to be a better way to communicate than plain text emails: It's visual—therefore much quicker to grab our attention. If we don't stop for that first split second to gander further, then the whole message is lost.

ianpri2• 14 years ago

I've built something very similar - http://www.mailerforge.com/ athough it does allow text and images to be added to a resizable canvas and creates a 'mobile-friendly' version.

I've not had much luck getting traction though, the people I show it to either prefer to build their own inhouse or just use a mailchimp/campaign monitor template and adapt that.

robeastham3• 14 years ago

This app seems to use similar paradigm to Campaign Monitor's superb template builder, going slightly further even and providing a completely blank canvas from which the user can create and design an email. I think this can work really well in some scenarios.

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.

ianpri2• 14 years ago

Its funny when you mention getting professional email designers on board, as after showing some early prototypes to some people whose job it is to make these 24/7 they scoffed at the idea - perhaps it was more a case of seeing their jobs at risk than anything else:)

knes• 14 years ago

Looks like a cool tool! I have been in the business of email for quite some time now ( I was sending 3M+ email / week not too long ago ) and I wish I had your tool back then.

I'm going to use it on couple of upcoming project. But after testing out the demo, it works like a charm!

Final question, how are you going to monetize this service?

anthemcg• 14 years ago

I have started messing around with the product, looks pretty good but I am not seeing any support for responsive e-mail or media query templates. Any plans for that?

Mailrox - a web app to quickly build bulletproof HTML emails

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