Bringing email to the future

As some of you caught it, this was our April fools prank! Available for real and promising to make your static emails interactive with images adapting in real-time, mjml@future is replacing all of the images in your MJML template into LOL gifs.

demo of mjml@future in action

Email, email, email. It’s been stuck in the past for way too long, and we decided it was enough. Today, we’re bringing you the most exciting update email has known since Outlook decided to use Microsoft Word as their rendering engine: mjml@future.

As per Lucas Bonomi, front-end developer at Algolia and one of our early beta testers:

Finding the right image for the right moment can take hours at Algolia. We’re excited to leverage mjml@future and let Mailjet’s amazing tools pick all of our images for us!

Finding the right assets for your audience

While images shouldn’t be used as a way to bear important information, they’re key to bring the right message and spice up your emails thanks to beautiful graphics.

However, finding the right images, ones that match both your brand and your audience, can be a tricky exercise. You’re probably already spending hours looking for visuals and editing them so they don’t break in various email clients.

This ends today; say hello to mjml@future, which will allow images to automatically adapt to your readers, in real-time, as they open your email.

Placing interactivity at the heart of your email

As announced in most of the “top trends for 2017” lists, interactivity is here and you better deal with it.

Interactivity is the best way to engage your users and to offer a richer experience than just staring at a boring static email.

Unfortunately, as of now, interactivity in email is pretty much limited to cool experiments or requires a very complex coding process and expert skills. Today, this is over with mjml@future, as even your static email will automatically become interactive, offering a unique experience to your readers.

Put your time-travel jumpsuit on and dive into the future of email

Getting started in the coding of futuristic emails can’t get any easier. The only prerequisite is to have Node installed (LTS is good), then you can follow these simple steps:

1. Open a terminal window, such as “terminal” (MacOS) or “command prompt” (Windows).
2. cd Documents/code/emails (or any existing folder you like better) to go to the folder of your choice.
3. mkdir mjml-future to create a folder called mjml-future.
4. cd mjml-future to go the folder called mjml-future you just created.
5. npm install mjml@future to install mjml@future in this folder.
6. ./node_modules/.bin/mjml racoon.mjml to render a file called racoon.mjml (you need to have the template in the same folder, feel free to use one of your templates or this one).
7. open racoon.html (MacOS) or start racoon.html (Windows) to open the file that was rendered in your browser (if it’s the default application for HTML files).

And it’s done, all you have to do now is admire the result. Don’t forget to refresh the template after it’s rendered, you’ll see it change in real-time!

We hope you’re as excited as we are about this release and what it means for email. If you like it, share your awesome template on Twitter and on Slack!