Discussion

Responsive Emails, Written in Markdown

Kwpolska: This appears to be a MJML wrapper with a Markdown→HTML converter attached to it. I think generating HTML from code is easier than generating Markdown, since there are many templating tools that understand HTML escaping. And writing HTML is not that hard, especially for your typical emails, so I'm not really sure if this library would be helpful in the long run.

dallen33: I like the idea of this tool, as writing Markdown for some people is probably easier than HTML. I mean, use whatever floats your boat. I like that this exists.

alfanick: "Write markdown. Ship emails." - I see a particular group of people interested in this, but they have their tools already.

SunshineTheCat: I think you should probably let that group of people speak for themselves.I'm in this "group" and see an immediate usefulness of this over what I'm doing now.

KhushaliT: templates are cool but seems too heavy to land in primary inbox

koakuma-chan: I wish people just sent plain text.

XCSme: What about images, links? Formatted text like bold or underline?I also prefer plain text, but in most of my emails I talk about technical stuff, or I send transactional emails that require actions, in which case showing buttons is a much better user experience than plain text.

loloquwowndueo: I don’t want buttons in my emails.

j45: Also a way to use fewer standards for storage of input and created text.

ph4rsikal: Markdown is the secret winner of the AI early years.

XCSme: But they are a lot easier to see and click (accessibility, larger hit area).You could have a larger text instead of a button, but changing font size is also HTML and not plain-text anymore.

koakuma-chan: You can just send a link, and the user's client will probably highlight it even if it is plain text.

recursivegirth: Yea, but how will they hide all the tracking URLs and base64 encoded PII from you in the email?

koakuma-chan: Using a URL shortener obviously. But you are right, if they only send plain text, they won't be able to include those 1x1 images at the bottom to track whether you have opened the email. Any sane email client blocks images by default, but whatever.

hatmatrix: cries in org-mode

loloquwowndueo: I don’t have problems seeing and clicking normal text, thank you very much. I don’t want buttons on my emails.

antiframe: Every MUA I've used allows the reader to set a font size, so changing font sizes is 100% a feature of plain-text emails. Then they get the link the size they need to read it correctly and it's absolutely easy to read. This here comment is pain text. Is it hard to read this link:http://microsoft.com/I don't think so. I certainly didn't have to resort to HTML to make that link readable and clickable.

safehuss: Anything that makes email development easier is great I guess, but have personally found MJML great for solving the issues you'd run into, and not sure I want yet another abstraction layer on top of that which makes it more limited...

gojomo: Which email client will stylize raw markdown itself, making the HTML step here superfluous?

nailer: I don't. Plain text is typically formatted for 72-78 monospace characters - even if you don't want formatting, the text will look bad on any device that doesn't match IBM's 80-character punch cards from 1928.

Avamander: In theory format=flowed solves that, but the same boomers that despise HTML mail also refuse to provide that accommodation, for anyone not behind a teletype.

Barbing: Very nice. I think the kind of folks attracted to this thread might have some thoughts on a workflow I'm interested in.When I see a news article, I want to be able to click a button on my Mac or iPhone to send the text of the article in the body of the email. Bonus points for rehosting the images from the article. And using a similar font both without carrying over any of the original external dependencies.Normally it’s good to support the journalist but I cannot in good conscience send a link to elderly folks when this is so much safer.

runtype: Would love to use this - any plans for Cloudflare Workers support? Some of the node APIs you're using block it from working on Cloudflare right now.

articsputnik: Love everything to Markdownify :) I was just wondering, is there a Neovim/Markdown email client? Potentially using something like this? I love Neomutt, or Newsboat, and other TUIs. It would be great to have something totally on Markdown. Update: I gave it a spin [1] with Go and some of my favorite CLI's.[1] https://x.com/sspaeti/status/2036539855182627169

dancablam: There's not one that I'm aware of. Maybe it's about time there is :D

articsputnik: I gave Claude a spin, given all my likings ;) https://github.com/ssp-data/neomd

johanvts: Use the browser reader mode, select all, right click send email. Is it something like that you want?

dancablam: Good idea. I'll look into this.

Escapade5160: At this point markdown is going to be the foundation of the entire AI web. Someone the other day showed off Markdown as a responsive frontend protocol. Now we've got email. How long until we're writing classes in markdown? We can only abstract this so far before we confuse AI more than help it.

whattheheckheck: Look up Configuration Complexity clock

razvan_maftei: I'm not exactly following as to who this is for - people are going to use email templates instead of writing Markdown emails, and agents can just as easily spit out HTML. Seems like your solution is in search of a problem.

Lord_Zero: Does anyone use MJML in golang? What package are you using?

binaryturtle: Any "HTML emails" get filtered straight into the spam folder here. I think I'm not part of the target audience here.

Lord_Zero: Is that a thing? Is it safer to use plain text emails?

Barbing: Thank you! Great trick that comes pretty close.

vindin: This problem was solved almost 15 years ago

SergeAx: How do you deal with things like "we sent you a one-time code to confirm your login"? Most of those are HTML-formatted today

dancablam: Added support for cloudflare workers in 0.1.2. Thanks for the tip!

Avamander: It would first require a standard for Markdown. After that there would be very little stopping anyone from implementing it. I guess a MIME type for standard Markdown would also be nice.Pretty sure I've said it before, but it would be a nice middle ground between text and all the complexity HTML+CSS brings in (if you want to compete with other HTML clients).

SoftTalker: The idea of Markdown was that it was supposed to be readable in plain text without any stylizing.

ksajadi: This is great! I’d love to see this supported in SendOps!

mghackerlady: Very much so. While a lot of mail clients block images, they can be used to track you. Hell a lot of HTML can be used to track you if you're smart about it

mghackerlady: Or, hear me out. Just send the markdown and skip the HTML bullshit. Any mail client will render markdown fine and the ones that don't either aren't worth using or don't want HTML mail in the first place. HTML email is the worst thing to ever happen to the internet

seer: They address this in the docs - it is meant to make authoring the content easier for LLMs since that is easy for them to write.It still uses MJML for the actual templates, but it is a translation layer between markdown and the template itself.If you need to author a lot of emails with LLM this does seem like it would be a great fit.

vanillameow: If you need to author a lot of emails with LLM you should be rethinking your business strategy tbh

deknos: i never understood why the markdown mime type was not used in emailclients in webclients or desktop programs...that would eliminate most html usage and enable longer texts than 70-85 characters per line.

Ringz: If only there was a faster way to „select all“!

unmole: > Is that a thing?There must be literally dozens of people who do this.

bpev: I'm never seen the `::: header` or `{width="200"}` kind of syntax before. Is this custom or Frankenstein solution? Or is there some kind of md-extended pattern for defining components that has been gaining steam or smthn? Markdown tooling is always confusing, since everyone has their own standard.

annie511266728: Feels more like a content layer for LLMs than a replacement for MJML.In my experience models tend to break HTML layouts pretty easily, while Markdown degrades more gracefully.

lexro_ai: Nice. Markdown-to-email is one of those things that sounds simple until you actually try it and Outlook destroys everything. Curious how you're handling nested lists — that's usually where things fall apart. Does it degrade gracefully or just break?

austinjp: I'm not so sure. It's definitely the de facto standard, but I suspect minimal HTML is better. Just enough tags to add structure and meaning (H1-H6, p, a, em, section for structure including nesting, maybe more). LLMs were trained on a lot of HTML, they're good at processing it. HTML requires more tokens than markdown but I believe it's worth it. I'll find out in a few weeks as I experiment with both.

lproven: > What about images, links? Formatted text like bold or underline?Easy. Don't.That's the great bit. You don't have to.https://useplaintext.email/

XCSme: Why isn't this website plain text then?

austinjp: Yep both are widely used. I forget which markdowns extensions they originated from. The Pandoc website probably has the details.

phrotoma: Aye, I've seen these both in kramdown and quarto.

einr: Probably because it's a website and not email.

XCSme: But I have to send the same sort of information (albeit shorter) via email on a regular basis.A lot of alerts, reporting, quotes, code snippets, short documentation or step by step instructions, etc.I don't just send emails to say "Hey, let's meet at 5". You know the memes with "this could have been an email", it usually is this case.Just to be clear, most of those rich emails are the automatic/transactional emails.

pembrook: I like how you aren't hiding the fact this is MJML under the hood and don't layer complex abstractions over MJML spec like similar projects (cough react email cough).The devs maintaining MJML deserve so much credit for dealing with Gmail/Outlook's monopoly bullshit and 2007 html.Nice idea for those who manage content in markdown. I've moved away from putting emails in my codebase, but seems great for founders moving fast.

r1290: What’s your opinion on react email?

pembrook: Mostly fluff/hype. Not a value-add over just using raw MJML (which has nice VScode plugins for live previews), and in fact a long term risk to add to a codebase since react-email is just a marketing play by Resend (a startup) and will not be maintained as diligently as MJML.Also, LLMs know MJML really well.

einr: Yeah, I get it, I unfortunately live in the real world too. I like to keep it plain text whenever possible but it's extremely useful sometimes to have inline screenshots and stuff like that.I didn't mean to be sarcastic but it's just that to me, philosophically, email is a plaintext technology that had HTML bolted on to it kicking and screaming, and it's always been kind of crap. People like me hate things that are fundamentally ugly and crap even if they are useful. The web was designed for HTML from the start.

rcarr: https://github.com/remarkjs/remark-directivehttps://talk.commonmark.org/t/generic-directives-plugins-syn...

runtype: Sweet, thanks!

dancablam: It uses MJML under the hood to ensure email-safe HTML is generated. That should prevent many edge cases where failures can happen - but I'm sure there are some skeletons we'll have to find / fix.

dimaberlin: The real pain in email HTML isn't writing it — it's maintaining it. Markdown at least gives you something a human can edit 6 months later without crying.

Barbing: (if you’re down to experiment!)For the next three intriguing articles you see on arbitrary sites, does the select all trick produce an aesthetically pleasing email? Do external dependencies get carried over? Do you spend any time manually removing cruft? Does the formatting leave anything to be desired?When I do this all manually I can make it look great, and now that we’ve seen we can train computers to make stuff look great, it’s going to be a point of frustration for me until I have the one-click beautiful-article-email button.

joshmoody24: What do you mean by "too heavy"? File size?

joshmoody24: This is my experience as well. MJML is the older, more reliable, better documented technology. And when it comes to debugging email rendering, you really, REALLY want as much documentation as possible.

joshmoody24: I used to think this, but lately I'm getting a lot of plain text marketing emails that are clearly LLMs. Now I dislike plain text emails just as much as HTML ones.