Thank you! Yes, we want to reduce the time to get in to ... zero :-) If you have any suggestions on the editor, please post on http://forum.beefree.io/
Free online email editor: we made it free to gather feedback and try to build the best email editor around, over time. Take a minute to check it out and let us know what you think!
There is no privacy policy. I don't know if what I enter ends up on your servers (or any of filepicker.io, fonts.net, jsdeliv.net, mailup.it (ok, that's you) and of course the obligatory infestation of google analytics and cloudfront). Is it all local?
You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data. This can be done by displaying a prominent link to the site “How Google uses data when you use our partners' sites or apps”, (located at www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/, or any other URL Google may provide from time to time).
We've done a lot of testing. We use Email On Acid (they're a partner of ours). It's hard to have 100% consistent results across all email clients and mobile devices (we're definitely not there yet), but we're pretty happy with the overall results. If you see any issues, please post on http://forum.beefree.io/
Opera is heading to less than 1% market share for many desktop sites - it's unlikely that there will be much engineering time devoted to supporting it on most sites that are engineering-constrained (i.e. almost all of them). It's almost always a better idea to make your product more appealing to the other 99%.
Thank you! Our team had a lot of fun building this. It took several months of very hard work (and we have a lot more that we're going to do with it). Thanks again!
As we've been growing our SaaS service, Cronitor, i've been humbled by the effectiveness of simply written plain-text emails. A year ago I'd have said text emails were for luddites; now I'm an evangelist. That said, this looks like a very well done product and the HTML newsletter-style email isn't going anywhere. Congrats on shipping!
It does make me wonder though, what happened to plain text emails? I had to abandon my favourite email client (mutt) purely because I received too many html emails. And I'm not just talking about marketing emails. Those I don't care about. I'm talking about work emails from colleagues.
Email supports multiple MIME types, so if someone sends you an HTML email, they should also be converting that HTML into a text representation as well so you can choose (or your email client can choose) which version you want to read.
Converting from HTML to text isn't that difficult, there are a number of open source libraries that'll do it. The harder problem is if someone sends you an email with a lot of images or where the layout of content is important, which is why people typically use HTML, it's much harder to map those aspects to plain text.
Every time I get a crappy text version of an email, I try to contact the company (via email or Twitter) to get them to care about text emails. Usually, I've received encouraging replies. It seems like marketing email services don't optimise text versions and companies don't even realise that. Probably because fewer people care about text versions.
I encourage you too, to send requests for better text emails if you care about this.
It's only a matter of time until someone open sources an editor like this or, probably more useful more most people, creates a service that embeds an email editor like this in your app.
It'll be interesting to see how much adoption it gets because I don't think it's the solution most people really want. IMO, something simpler like a Markdown / Bootstrap for email is the real solution -- something that takes a simpler syntax or simple HTML and compiles it into "email compatible" HTML.
The thing that really sucks about email design is that you are stuck with HTML circa the early 2000s. An abstraction layer that took care of those annoying details seems like the real way to go. Curious what others think.
Dealing with actual clients that sends e-mail campaigns, trying to get them to deal with Markdown would be an absolute disaster.
Then again, we have in-house editor similar to this (though less polished), and letting them use that is often also a disaster. We've found that making the templates more restrictive (give them places to type text, but not much more) tends to work best.
I agree 100%, even giving the client access to a simple WYSIWYG editor (think mailchimp, campaign monitor, exacttarget, etc) always end up in a nightmare is mis-aligned and wrongly sized graphics and text. Not to mention what happens on mobile and of course outlook's wonderful rendering.
We build a lot of emails and we don't allow our clients to touch anything. It's something I hate dealing with on all levels but the ROI can be incredible for some business's.
Congrats on a cool product! Is it possible to expose this somehow as an RESTful API that people can POST to with the images as links, etc and get a link to the formed html? Is this on your roadmap?
This would be so nice in sending emails in an automated fashion.
Also, it is awesome to provide full functionality to test without jumping through signup hoops.
Thank you! Not having any signups was a top priority for us. As for exposing a RESTful API, yes! And considering the among of comments here that go in the same direction, we'll have to raise the priority on this BIG TIME!! Thanks so much for the feedback.
Oddities:
1. The keywords <meta> tag is missing a closing bracket on most if not all pages.
2. The main edit page has <link> tags located after the final </html> tag.
The preview window lacks a way to scroll the view (you can do it in the mobile mockup but the desktop view has no scrollbar and using keyboard to scroll down is unconvenient)
a little OT, but related: is there a good Outlook or Office-composed email cleaner? something like HTMLpurify but that has enough knowledge of css/html to largely retain original layout?
i'm making a small web-based smtp/imap client for an internal app and there's a lot of crappy email in mailboxes that i'd want to clean before dumping them into the browser for display.
Yep. If I remember correctly, that's a tough one that we're still struggling with. BeeFree is very much a work in progress, so you'll definitely see some improvements in terms of email client rendering issues in the future. Thanks again for your feedback.
