

Mailrox - a web app to quickly build bulletproof HTML emails - vacipr
https://www.mailrox.com/

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sync
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?

~~~
smickie
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.

~~~
brittohalloran
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.

~~~
smickie
You're right, I'm really on the fence with this, it's a hard one. I'm going to
look into getting a light-weight HTML email for the system notifications. If
the right balance can be struck I'll go for HTML.

Edit: When I say HTML I mean well designed (boxes, colors and logos). At the
moment, like tomwalsham said, its just some <p> tags.

~~~
backwardm
Just to add my voice to the thread above—I also thought it was odd to get a
plain-jane invite email. The overall idea of the app is really enticing to me
though because I really hate coding up emails using the old-school tables,
font-face, etc.

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fooandbarify
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?

~~~
smickie
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.

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DanBC
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!

~~~
smickie
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."

~~~
tomwalsham
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.

~~~
robeastham
Tom you can signup for an invite on the homepage:

<https://www.mailrox.com>

Your invite should come straight through :)

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mnutt
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.

~~~
smickie
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.

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

~~~
smickie
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).

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ianpri
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.

~~~
robeastham
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.

~~~
ianpri
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:)

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knes
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?

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rjzzleep
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
Which is nobody.

HTML email is a scourge.

~~~
backwardm
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.

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

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

~~~
smickie
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. :)

~~~
fooandbarify
+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"
:)

~~~
robeastham
We've got Uservoice powered support and so if you have any other suggestions
it'd be great if you add them over there so we can better track which features
to prioritise.

<http://support.mailrox.com/>

We've added one for this request and so feel free to upvote and make comments
on what you'd like to see included in a future text editor:

[http://support.mailrox.com/forums/163882-general/suggestions...](http://support.mailrox.com/forums/163882-general/suggestions/2907346-a-rich-
text-editor-and-text-tab-to-the-edit-conten)

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anthemcg
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?

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

~~~
smickie
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
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. :)

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

~~~
smickie
Not unnecessary. Just easier!

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

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

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ams6110
HTML is for web pages. Text is for emails.

~~~
RobAley
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.

