Foundation: A toolkit for designing responsive emails

Zurb announced today version 2 of “Foundation for Email”, a full stack for designing content for responsive email.
inky
It looks rather nice, with features a modern web developer might look for when working on email content. It has many of the things you’d expect a web design stack to have. It support SASS for styling, includes browser sync for previewing content as it’s edited, both on a local browser and on a device, and uses gulp to tie the workflow together.
But it also has some features useful for email that you’d be unlikely to find in a web design stack. It has an inliner, to convert separate SASS/CSS and HTML content into a single HTML document suitable for sending by mail. And it supports a slightly extended HTML format called “Inky”, which lets you use simple tags like <row> and <column> to develop grid-based content, then compile those into old-school HTML tables which mail clients will happily render.
And it comes with ten starter templates for different types of email.
You can find documentation, downloads and examples here.

Related Posts

Mailbox preview and HTML content

I just received a slightly confusing email.
 
Inbox__86332_messages__19_unread_
 
The From address and the Subject line are from Sony, but the content looks like it’s from email analytics firm Litmus. What’s going on here?
Opening the mail it looks like a fairly generic “Oops, we lost a class-action lawsuit, have $2 worth of worthless internet points!” email from Sony; no mention of Litmus at all. My first thought is that Mail.app has managed to scramble it’s summary database and it’s pulling summaries from the wrong email, as I am on a Litmus mailing list or two, but nothing else looks off.
Digging around inside the source of the mail I do find a bunch of tracking gifs from emltrk.com, which is a Litmus domain so there is a Litmus connection there somewhere. Curious.
Finally, about two pages in to the HTML part of the mail I find this:

Read More

Email design resources

One of the more frequent questions I get that I can’t answer is how to design a good email. Design is just not my strong point and outside actually getting the HTML right, what an email looks like doesn’t have a whole lot to do with delivery. It was pointed out to me today that the nice people over at Mailchimp have a resource page for designing emails.  It’s a good mix of theory and explanation and some code examples.
Very useful if you’re trying to create pretty HTML emails from scratch.

Read More

What causes Spamhaus CSS listings

Today’s Wednesday Question comes from Zaib F.

What causes the Spamhaus CSS listing in your experience other than Sender using multiple sets of IPs, to look as if they are a valid sender. Do you think a Spamtrap plays a role?

Read More