
Open Source Email Templates - bvanvugt
https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates
======
mrmch
sendwithus cofounder; we've had a template gallery internally in the product
since launch, but we felt that these templates were something that everyone
should be able to use.

We didn't want to launch "just another template gallery", like many others, so
we've made these open source. Contribute a pull request on github[0], we'll
merge it, run it through Litmus and make sure it's still responsive. You can
read about it on the 'about' page[1]

[0]
[https://github.com/sendwithus/templates](https://github.com/sendwithus/templates)

[1]
[https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about](https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about)

~~~
j_s
Awesome, I think you just became the Bootstrap of email by default!

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guynamedloren
See Zurb Ink, which is also open sourced, but might be a bit closer to
Bootstrap as it also has a framework.

[http://zurb.com/ink/](http://zurb.com/ink/)

~~~
tjaspers
That looks pretty good, thanks for the share.

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programminggeek
You know what's funny? Often the highest converting and best user experience
emails are... just text and links.

Yep, all the branded shenanigans and responsive mumbojumbo doesn't necessarily
beat just sending an email in its native form.

As it turns out, most of the logos and branding are self serving and nobody
cares. Many of the most profitable email lists on the internet have no style
at all, are long form text, have plain blue links, and they make millions of
dollars in sales.

This is a cool project, but don't forget to treat email in its native form.

~~~
mrmch
We always encourage people to A/B test plain text versus HTML, and from the
results seen it's entirely dependent on the audience.

If you're emailing developers, keep it clean/plain. Many consumers appreciate
if an email "looks/feels like the website".

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JoshTriplett
If you build emails based on these, please make sure you send them
multipart/alternative with a text/plain version as well. And in particular,
make sure that text/plain version isn't just "go read the HTML", or worse a
copy of the HTML complete with tags.

~~~
danieltillett
Great suggestion. You would think this would be built into the templates.

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wuliwong
They are open source, so...

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Aldo_MX
This is amazing, although I can't help but feel skeptical every time I read
the word _responsive_ next to the word _e-mail_ considering only Thunderbird
and Apple Mail speak responsive.

Sadly, email design is like travelling to a twisted dimension.

The most effective markup for layouts are the dreaded tables, the most
effective way to style your markup is with inline styles, and the most used
email client (Microsoft Outlook 2007~13) has an engine exponentially worse
than Trident from Internet Explorer 6[1].

And don't get me started with Android/Gmail because Google seems devoted in
beating Microsoft with the worst experience for email design.

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/aa338201(v=office.12...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/aa338201\(v=office.12\).aspx#Word2007MailHTMLandCSS_Introduction)

~~~
rodriguezcommaj
Actually, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish in email these days.
While there are still problem email clients when it comes to responsive
(Gmail, the Gmail mobile app, some Android clients, and a few iOS clients like
Mailbox), you can build responsive emails fairly easily.

While it's true that you need to rely on tables, some HTML attributes, and a
lot of inline styles - we routinely use classes, media queries, and CSS3 in
our emails at Litmus. We've even pulled off HTML5 video backgrounds and some
cool stuff with CSS3 animations. All in email.

Outlook definitely has issues, more recently with rendering in Outlook.com,
but they are known issues—most with quick fixes.

More importantly, there are a ton of great resources out there. At Litmus, we
actually started a community around email design to help people learn and
troubleshoot ([https://litmus.com/community](https://litmus.com/community)).
If anyone's interested, here are some good email design resources:

Responsive Email Patterns -
[http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/](http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/)
Responsive Email Resources -
[http://responsiveemailresources.com/](http://responsiveemailresources.com/)
Action Rocket Labs blog -
[http://labs.actionrocket.co/](http://labs.actionrocket.co/) Campaign Monitor
CSS Support Guide -
[https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/](https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/)
MailChimp Email Design Reference -
[http://templates.mailchimp.com/](http://templates.mailchimp.com/)

Hell, I even wrote a book on responsive email design
([http://modernhtmlemail.com](http://modernhtmlemail.com)).

Email is definitely its own, weird world - but it's a world that is improving
and growing every day. More importantly, it's a world filled with dedicated
and clever people that are refining techniques, building tools, and sharing
knowledge to make working with email easier than ever.

~~~
Aldo_MX
Actually I'm surprised at what can be accomplished in email these days, but in
a negative way (sorry to be too pessimistic).

In the browser I already got my peace of mind back when it comes to cross-
browser compatibility, because I can design a website in the browser of my
choice, and when I test in other browsers, most of times there are no issues,
or the issues are too minimal to get upset by having to fix them.

It's cool to have a place with an active community where someone can find
tools, resources, workarounds, etc., but that is just a way to alleviate the
problem.

An e-mail standard proposal[1] already exists, but providers (especially
Google) doesn't seem too motivated to adhere to that standard :/...

[1] [http://www.email-standards.org/](http://www.email-standards.org/)

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rquantz
I can't tell you how many times I've wanted something like this. The pain of
writing and testing html email is pretty huge, and the only people doing an
even halfway decent job with them seem to be the proprietary email campaign
companies, and until now they don't seem interested in making them as
accessible as this.

Plus, these templates look pretty slick.

~~~
troymcginnis
Glad that you appreciate them! Feel free to use them or contribute to them to
your hearts content :)

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eli
They are much less fully fleshed out, but Zurb Ink has some sample templates
along with a whole system for responsive email design:
[http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php](http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php)

~~~
mrmch
The Zurb Ink templates are great! We use them as a base for some of our
templates as well.

The process of going from the Zurb template to something you might want to
actually use often means people break the responsive elements of the template
-- something we're hoping to avoid with this template gallery.

~~~
eli
Yup definitely agree with that. I think Ink might be the future of email
design, bUt it's still pretty rough in real world use today.

I'll take a closer look at these templates. Thanks.

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adhsu01
This is great. Thanks a lot for sharing. We're working on html emails for our
own project and it's shocking how arcane and backwards this entire thing is.
Hopefully these templates will save us a lot of time.

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nichodges
These are great. I'm a week off shipping a product that is primarily delivered
via email, to C-suite'ers. Most of these people check all email on their
phone, so these are an amazing help in shipping the MVP.

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mrmch
Glad we could help out!

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nichodges
Also I'm sure you'd track this, but from an audience-of-one I can say this is
great content marketing! I've used SendGrid previously on a few side projects,
and will now definitely be checking out your service.

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ramoq
Excellent job. For those interested in just seeing (no source) really well
designed emails can alwasy check out:
[http://reallygoodemails.com/](http://reallygoodemails.com/)

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wesleycyu
Awesome responsive email templates. More info here:
[https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about](https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about)

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danieltillett
In my endless fight with Microsoft’s worse than useless spam filters (my how I
hate hotmail and her ugly sisters), how does using a common template like this
affect the false positive junk mail rate?

On this topic does anyone have any trick suggestion beyond the obvious (spf,
dkim, etc) to keep emails away from Microsoft’s junk mail filter?

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erichurkman
Anecdotal, but I have had better luck sending through an email provider to
Hotmail (and Outlook.com and friends) rather than setting up my own outbound
SMTP. I've used both Mailgun and Mandrill – of course, make sure you set up
SPF and DKIM with the provider, too.

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danieltillett
Yes I already do this - still doesn’t solve the hotmail junk filter hell.

The emails I send are not newsletter, just invoices and the like. They go
through fine to gmail, yahoo, etc, but for no known reason Microsoft’s useless
filters marks them as spam. Of course the average hotmail user never thinks to
look in their junk mail folder no matter how many times they are told :(

~~~
frik
Interesting, I had no issues with GMail and Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com but with
Yahoo. A handful of Yahoo user that mark their own registration email as junk
is enough that Yahoo add the domain to their junk filter. It doesn't help that
Yahoo has a very prominent "Spam" button in their UI (in GMail & Outlook it's
on a drop-down menu).

~~~
danieltillett
I have issues on occasion with yahoo, but it is only for a week or so at a
time. Microsoft consistently gives me issues. Of course all my test emails to
my hotmail test accounts go through without any issue. From what I have been
able to determine the filter only appears to be trigged on a certain
percentage of email accounts.

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thehal84
Very nice! Just a shame most of these will not work with gmail since it blocks
internal style sheets.

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mrmch
That's why all the CSS is inlined for you as well :)

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thehal84
Nice, i missed that while glancing at it on git. I've starred the repo and
appreciate the contributions everyone has made to it.

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_fluffy
When I saw "open source mail templates" I thought it'd be things like ways of
insulting people who report bugs or provide patches, or calling everyone
idiots for not wrapping their plain-text emails at 72 columns, or whatever.

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_asciiker_
very misleading title for a commercial solution.

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cbr
It's under the Apache license and all; what more do you want?

