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...
If the goal is to write emails purely using AI, then it is trivial to attach the MJML documentation as context to your LLM using context7 MCP or something of the sort. It's not a very complex language and its documentation is not large at all.
That's assuming the crawlers haven't ingested it all already...
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.
I never actually thought about this. How are people making HTML emails so responsive? Email HTML is stuck in the IE6 era, right? So everything is just a horrible workaround with tables and ancient CSS?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
But most SPAMs are HTML, so you'll have a good default last-stage in-client filtering in place in case some SPAM actually makes it through the other setup on the server (greylisting, DNS based filtering lists, policy-based filtering, etc.) :)
That's a valid concern, especially given the confusion we saw with .zip or .mov TLDs. But from a security engineering perspective, the bigger 'Markdown hole' I worry about is injection. When we render untrusted AI output into HTML for email, the sanitization pipeline becomes critical. I'd be curious to see how this library handles potential XSS vectors during the MD-to-HTML conversion.
Great project! And if you don't mind a little workaround and some Python scripting, you can turn a regular Obsidian folder into an automatic outbox. Write markdown, drag, drop, and ship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
I think the OP app is meant for creating transactional emails (or bulk-send emails like newsletters).
Those templates should account for all types of people and accessibility levels (including things like ADHD, where you need a big red button to click, otherwise you get overwhelmed by a block of text).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Nice usage of admonitions. This is a great example of how eloquent markdown can be. Still very readable while even including the markup for 'footer' and the call out code.
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.
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.
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.
Emacs ofc :) seriously it should not be too much work although org-mode syntax would be even easier, there is a markdown mode here: https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/
The email part is not something i have done myself but it has been a feature for a very long time and you can find plenty of guides online.
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).
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
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.
That's assuming the crawlers haven't ingested it all already...
:: gallery
  
::
https://talk.commonmark.org/t/generic-directives-plugins-syn...
that would eliminate most html usage and enable longer texts than 70-85 characters per line.
There must be literally dozens of people who do this.
But most SPAMs are HTML, so you'll have a good default last-stage in-client filtering in place in case some SPAM actually makes it through the other setup on the server (greylisting, DNS based filtering lists, policy-based filtering, etc.) :)
In my experience models tend to break HTML layouts pretty easily, while Markdown degrades more gracefully.
https://mjml.io/
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.
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.
[1] https://x.com/sspaeti/status/2036539855182627169
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.
You could have a larger text instead of a button, but changing font size is also HTML and not plain-text anymore.
http://microsoft.com/
I don't think so. I certainly didn't have to resort to HTML to make that link readable and clickable.
Those templates should account for all types of people and accessibility levels (including things like ADHD, where you need a big red button to click, otherwise you get overwhelmed by a block of text).
Easy. Don't.
That's the great bit. You don't have to.
https://useplaintext.email/
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.
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.
Human language is an unnecessary abstraction, just like images.
I wish everyone would communicate in pure Binary.
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.
Also, LLMs know MJML really well.
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).
I'm in this "group" and see an immediate usefulness of this over what I'm doing now.