rodriguezcommaj

It's a huge step forward. It effectively means that we will be able to do traditional responsive stuff using media queries but perhaps more importantly, we can stop having to use inline styles everywhere. That means a big reduction in duplicated code and HTML emails that are MUCH easier to maintain. The increase in efficiency will allow email people to focus on creating better content so that emails are more useful to people.

That's a good question. I'm not sure about StampReady, but Campaign Monitor has a few of the best email designers in the biz working there (namely Nicole Merlin and Stig Morten Myre) who strive for really robust templates. Nicole in particular has written about her approach (typically called 'hybrid' or 'spongey' development), which works without media queries. It's basically using fluid tables, max-width, and MSO conditional tables to get things working and is the best approach around these days. You can read more about it here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-a-future-pr...

I wouldn't be surprised if Campaign Monitor's email templates built in their builder follow the same approach. MailChimp's too, for that matter. The team there use similar techniques.

You should look into http://www.stampready.net - along with Campaign Monitor's email builder (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/create-custom-email...), it's one of the best drag-and-drop tools for creating really good, responsive emails. The problem with any of these tools is that they still spit out sometimes convoluted code, but that can't really be avoided since they need to cover their asses in literally dozens of different popular email clients.

If you're looking to code, you should check out Litmus Builder (http://litmus.com/email-builder), a code editor specifically built for email design. Has a bunch of templates available, instant previews in a bunch of different clients, email-specific CSS inlining, etc. Full disclosure: I work at Litmus, but even if I didn't, I'd still use Builder for the previews alone.

Great work, Matt. I think you guys did a great job with these, especially having multiple layouts for each template to handle different use cases. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that one layout works for every situation—it's nice to see you guys helping to remedy that misconception.

Chuffed to see you using Litmus, too!

Ink is cool. There are a surprising number of templates out there now, too. Brian Graves has a great site of resources with a template section at http://responsiveemailresources.com/

I also released one based on the template we use at Litmus to accompany an article in A List Apart. Article - http://alistapart.com/article/can-email-be-responsive Template - https://github.com/alistapart/salted

Actually, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish in email these days. While there are still problem email clients when it comes to responsive (Gmail, the Gmail mobile app, some Android clients, and a few iOS clients like Mailbox), you can build responsive emails fairly easily.

While it's true that you need to rely on tables, some HTML attributes, and a lot of inline styles - we routinely use classes, media queries, and CSS3 in our emails at Litmus. We've even pulled off HTML5 video backgrounds and some cool stuff with CSS3 animations. All in email.

Outlook definitely has issues, more recently with rendering in Outlook.com, but they are known issues—most with quick fixes.

More importantly, there are a ton of great resources out there. At Litmus, we actually started a community around email design to help people learn and troubleshoot (https://litmus.com/community). If anyone's interested, here are some good email design resources:

Responsive Email Patterns - http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/ Responsive Email Resources - http://responsiveemailresources.com/ Action Rocket Labs blog - http://labs.actionrocket.co/ Campaign Monitor CSS Support Guide - https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ MailChimp Email Design Reference - http://templates.mailchimp.com/

Hell, I even wrote a book on responsive email design (http://modernhtmlemail.com).

Email is definitely its own, weird world - but it's a world that is improving and growing every day. More importantly, it's a world filled with dedicated and clever people that are refining techniques, building tools, and sharing knowledge to make working with email easier than ever.

The Zurb one is a cool start - you may also like Antwort - http://internations.github.io/antwort/ - and Brian Grave's Responsive Email Patterns - http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/

For general information, Anna Yeaman over at STYLECampaign made an amazing video on Responsive Email Design, a must-view if you're interested in the topic - http://stylecampaign.com/blog/2013/03/responsive-email-desig...

Shameless self promotion, I also wrote a book on the subject called Modern HTML Email - http://modernhtmlemail.com - good way to get into responsive email design and email marketing in general.

I'm actually the Community Manager at Litmus. If you still use the service and have issues, don't hesitate to shoot us an email at [email protected] - we're always trying to improve the service and help out our customers.