Creating Beautiful Emails With Rails

In most of my Rails projects, the basic out-of-the-box email layouts do the trick. They’re not pretty but they get the job done. If you are just sending out simple text emails then it’s fine. However, on some projects the basic template doesn’t cut and we need something nicer. Would it be great if you could get Rails to send out emails that look similiar to those sent by Mail Chimp or other professional email marketing apps.

Well, it’s actually not that hard to improve your email layouts in Rails and get something that looks great.

Step One: Install the premailer-rails gem

The premailer-rails gem is a drop in solution for automatically applying your CSS styles to your HTML emails.

Step Two: Spice up your mailer layout

Don’t try and re-invent the wheel here. There are some great boilerplate HTML email templates that you can use to give you a solid foundation for your email design. My favourite option is actually provided by Mailchimp and it’s called “Email Blueprints”.

https://github.com/mailchimp/email-blueprints

Step Three: Design your Mailer Layout & CSS

Step Four: Setup Asset Precompilation

Add your mailer.css to config/initalizers/assets.rb

Step Five: Setup your Mailers

Step Six (Optional): Set up Devise