Emails without tables

It is possible! You just need to forget a couple of email clients.

At Attentive we started developing a new Reporting email. The requirements were that this report would have insightful information about a Team’s Sales Pipeline. We would send on the first work day of the month a Slack message and email.

The email and the Slack messages would also have a PDF version attached.

When we started to spec out the implementation we started investigating how to build the email we came accross an article by Litmus where they mentioned emails without tables.

Building an email without tables is a dream come true. No more endless nesting of HTML tables would produce much cleaner and easy to maintain code.

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Hawkers and the decline in customer service

Let’s start with the story. On the 30th of May Hawkers was doing a 72 hours sale which put some sunglasses at 19€ and also offered free shipping. Being a fan of Hawkers I jumped in and bought two pairs. Then the problems started. I chose, as method of payment, Multibanco. What ususally happens with Multibanco is that you get some payment reference (a number) and you use it to pay.

Unfortunately I never got that reference (and yes, I checked the spam folder).

After this I sent an email to their customer service saying that I never got any way of paying for my order and if there was anything wrong with my order.

First reply

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How I setup a free personal blog with HTTPS

Building a personal blog these days is very simple. By using open source tools together with some
nifty and awesome free services the only thing you’ll need to worry about paying
are the domain names.

My requirements were simple:

  1. Python is mandatory
  2. write articles in markdown
  3. content would be static
  4. deploy must happen by running a script or less

Python & Markdown

I was able to use Python because the offer of static website
generators is great. And this also makes writing in markdown
easy as most of the libraries support markdown files.

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