

BeeFree email editor - massiarri
https://beefree.io

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lemming
Massive props for letting me play around with it without having to sign up or
enter any data.

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massiarri
Thank you! Yes, we want to reduce the time to get in to ... zero :-) If you
have any suggestions on the editor, please post on
[http://forum.beefree.io/](http://forum.beefree.io/)

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massiarri
Free online email editor: we made it free to gather feedback and try to build
the best email editor around, over time. Take a minute to check it out and let
us know what you think!

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barake
I've been looking for a good email editor for a while now. Any chance of
BeeFree being embeddable, either as a service or open source?

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tomschlick
This! My app's clients would love this vs the tinymce type editor we currently
are giving them.

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massiarri
Great feedback. It sounds like we need to raise the priority on this :-)

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bpizzi
Is there a list out there of open-sourced stuff like this? I've been searching
for such editors to embed on some of my projects, but with no luck yet.

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porker
Seconded. Or even if not open-source: to integrate this into my apps, my
products would save shedloads of time.

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neals
Thirded, just about to ask this.

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massiarri
We do plan to have BeeFree as an embeddable widget. Not ready for that yet,
but coming in the near future.

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encoderer
As we've been growing our SaaS service, Cronitor, i've been humbled by the
effectiveness of simply written plain-text emails. A year ago I'd have said
text emails were for luddites; now I'm an evangelist. That said, this looks
like a very well done product and the HTML newsletter-style email isn't going
anywhere. Congrats on shipping!

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coherentpony
This is cool. Good work.

It does make me wonder though, what happened to plain text emails? I had to
abandon my favourite email client (mutt) purely because I received too many
html emails. And I'm not just talking about marketing emails. Those I don't
care about. I'm talking about work emails from colleagues.

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bialecki
Email supports multiple MIME types, so if someone sends you an HTML email,
they should also be converting that HTML into a text representation as well so
you can choose (or your email client can choose) which version you want to
read.

Converting from HTML to text isn't that difficult, there are a number of open
source libraries that'll do it. The harder problem is if someone sends you an
email with a lot of images or where the layout of content is important, which
is why people typically use HTML, it's much harder to map those aspects to
plain text.

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conradk
They should, but they don't. That's the problem.

Every time I get a crappy text version of an email, I try to contact the
company (via email or Twitter) to get them to care about text emails. Usually,
I've received encouraging replies. It seems like marketing email services
don't optimise text versions and companies don't even realise that. Probably
because fewer people care about text versions.

I encourage you too, to send requests for better text emails if you care about
this.

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bialecki
It's only a matter of time until someone open sources an editor like this or,
probably more useful more most people, creates a service that embeds an email
editor like this in your app.

It'll be interesting to see how much adoption it gets because I don't think
it's the solution most people really want. IMO, something simpler like a
Markdown / Bootstrap for email is the real solution -- something that takes a
simpler syntax or simple HTML and compiles it into "email compatible" HTML.

The thing that really sucks about email design is that you are stuck with HTML
circa the early 2000s. An abstraction layer that took care of those annoying
details seems like the real way to go. Curious what others think.

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vidarh
Dealing with actual clients that sends e-mail campaigns, trying to get them to
deal with Markdown would be an absolute disaster.

Then again, we _have_ in-house editor similar to this (though less polished),
and letting them use that is often also a disaster. We've found that making
the templates more restrictive (give them places to type text, but not much
more) tends to work best.

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wyck
I agree 100%, even giving the client access to a simple WYSIWYG editor (think
mailchimp, campaign monitor, exacttarget, etc) always end up in a nightmare is
mis-aligned and wrongly sized graphics and text. Not to mention what happens
on mobile and of course outlook's wonderful rendering.

We build a lot of emails and we don't allow our clients to touch anything.
It's something I hate dealing with on all levels but the ROI can be incredible
for some business's.

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ekr
As a sidenote: BeeFree is a well-known Win9x malware :
[http://vxheavens.com/29a/29a-6/29a-6.402](http://vxheavens.com/29a/29a-6/29a-6.402)
.

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massiarri
Ouch, we had no idea. I guess it's too late now. Oh well, maybe we'll give a
good reputation to a name that had a bad one :-)

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foolinaround
Congrats on a cool product! Is it possible to expose this somehow as an
RESTful API that people can POST to with the images as links, etc and get a
link to the formed html? Is this on your roadmap?

This would be so nice in sending emails in an automated fashion.

Also, it is awesome to provide full functionality to test without jumping
through signup hoops.

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massiarri
Thank you! Not having any signups was a top priority for us. As for exposing a
RESTful API, yes! And considering the among of comments here that go in the
same direction, we'll have to raise the priority on this BIG TIME!! Thanks so
much for the feedback.

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samplonius
Oddities: 1\. The keywords <meta> tag is missing a closing bracket on most if
not all pages. 2\. The main edit page has <link> tags located after the final
</html> tag.

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massiarri
Thanks! We'll look into it.

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ozh
Super neat.

The preview window lacks a way to scroll the view (you can do it in the mobile
mockup but the desktop view has no scrollbar and using keyboard to scroll down
is unconvenient)

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leeoniya
a little OT, but related: is there a good Outlook or Office-composed email
cleaner? something like HTMLpurify but that has enough knowledge of css/html
to largely retain original layout?

i'm making a small web-based smtp/imap client for an internal app and there's
a lot of crappy email in mailboxes that i'd want to clean before dumping them
into the browser for display.

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pmx
This is awesome! I would love to be able to install this on my own server, are
there any plans for something like that?

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k_
Great! But the test email I sent was completely broken in android's gmail app
=/

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k_
That was an issue with auto resize, but it was the default settings.

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massiarri
Yep. If I remember correctly, that's a tough one that we're still struggling
with. BeeFree is very much a work in progress, so you'll definitely see some
improvements in terms of email client rendering issues in the future. Thanks
again for your feedback.

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computerjunkie
This is a nice project. I look forward to using it soon for some of my side
projects.

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massiarri
Cool! If you have any suggestions, please post on
[http://forum.beefree.io/](http://forum.beefree.io/)

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keeptrying
This is freaking amazing. Just freaking brilliant.

Thank you!

~~~
massiarri
Thanks so much for the kind words. It was a lot of work (and there's a lot of
work ahead of us). This means a lot to the team! Thanks again.

