💌 MailDown

MailDown is (very much an alpha) CLI tool for writing transactional and marketing emails using markdown.

MM comes with a slew of impressive features, such as:

📱 Responsiveness by default: MailDown uses MJML under-the-hood for its styling, layout engine and transpiler, so you can be assured that your emails will look beautiful on every device.

🔁 Variable interpolation: Using the incredibly-fast ETA templating language, MailDown allows you to inject variables into your email templates at runtime.

🙏🏻 No runtime overhead: MailDown compiles your email templates to regular JavaScript functions, so there's no need to read HTML files from the filesystem or use MJML at runtime.

MailDown is still an unpublished project and in active development. Expect bugs.

How to use

Using MailDown is dead-simple. Once the CLI is installed (after we publish it lol), you can set up a project similar to the following:

emails/
  en/
    hello-world.email.md

Where hello-world.email.md might look something like:

# Hello world!

Hey {{ name }},

This is a test email!

Then, in your root directory, run:

$ maildown generate

which will produce an index.js file inside the emails directory.

You can then use your email templates as follows:

import { helloWorld } from './emails';

console.log(helloWorld.en.html({ name: 'John Doe' }));

You can check out the example folder for a fuller example!

Why would I need this?

With the plethora of high-end email suites like SendGrid and MailChimp, it might be inconceivable why you want (or need) a library like this. There are a few reasons we decided to build this library, so let's look at them:

• Money: As your company grows, tools like SendGrid and MailChimp only become more and more expensive. Cheaper alternatives, such as AWS SES don't feature snazzy template builders and expect you to bring your own HTML. That's where MailDown comes in.
• Control: Keeping all your email templates inside a SaaS product limits the portability of those templates if you decide to move to a different provider in the future. MailDown allows you to keep your email templates checked-in to version control, so you can send them using any provider.
• Customization: By giving developers full control over their email's styling, HTML, and content, they have the ability to bypass any restrictions imposed by a SaaS product.

A word to the wise

Considering MailDown allows you to bypass needing to rely on a SaaS product for your emails, it will be your responsibility to implement contact management and unsubscribe links. This is crucial, as not providing a way for users to unsubscribe from emails may break anti-spam laws.