The latest articles on DEV Community by Peter Sugihara (@rgbrgb). https://dev.to/rgbrgb https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F896726%2Fe2dbed26-6bcb-410a-8e9e-621db6b047fc.jpeg https://dev.to/rgbrgb en Peter Sugihara Sun, 24 Jul 2022 16:00:54 +0000 https://dev.to/rgbrgb/mailing-build-test-send-emails-with-typescript-and-react-2m64 https://dev.to/rgbrgb/mailing-build-test-send-emails-with-typescript-and-react-2m64 <h3> <a href="https://github.com/successor-software/mailing">Github link</a> </h3> <p>We’re longtime users of Action Mailer and wanted something similar for our typescript/react apps. We didn’t find anything, so we decided to build Mailing. We added some small features that we would’ve liked in Action Mailer, including a mobile preview toggle (with hotkeys), and the ability to send a test email right from the browser while developing. Finally, we went all in on MJML so that we never have to think about nested tables or email clients :)</p> <p><em>HTML is simple, why a framework?</em><br> Writing raw HTML for emails is a bit like making a website in 1999… table layout, inline styling, no JS at runtime. As modern web frameworks mature it becomes more and more arcane relative to the rest of the codebase.</p> <p><em>Why code emails at all?</em><br> There are a lot of nice no-code SaaS email solutions these days, but sometimes you want your app to be self-contained or need more automated testability or you want to enforce a design system programatically. I’ve hit all of the above and I’m also just more comfortable expressing layout as code than learning a bespoke WYSIWYG editor.</p> <p>At our real estate startup, one of our most loved features was an email digest of new properties matching your search criteria. It was a cornerstone retention mechanism and we had a ton of logic (and tests) ensuring that it wasn’t sent twice in a day, never contained the same property more than once in a week, had the properties ordered in a certain way, could be retried on failure, metered sends over time to avoid self-DDOS etc, etc. As we grew and started moving some stuff to Mailchimp and Iterable for marketing to own, product emails with a ton of logic stayed in the codebase where they could be tested.</p> <p>Without further adieu, please check it out and LMK if you find it useful (or bugs). Thanks!!</p> <h1> <a href="https://github.com/successor-software/mailing">Check it out on Github!</a> </h1> typescript react opensource showdev