I recently upgraded Sendy, the software, I’m using to create and send my newsletters.
(I don’t need the new shiny, or the extra features, but also those folks have been pretty good as far as pricing and functionality go, and I want them to stick around for a long time.)

The new release, in addition to a refreshed interface, now features a block WYSIWYG editor. And my old template (based on the venerable Antwort) that I used to compose my emails broke. What used to be a predictable way of writing emails, now turned into something filled with papercuts. Everything would look alright, but everything was ever so subtly out of place.

So I went looking for something that I could live with long term once again.
Since all of this is a personal hobby and I only use all of this to send mail to a handful of my friends, most of the paid options go right out of the window, because. And because I am a control freak, hosted options aren’t a thing for me either.

Enter MJML.
From their website:

MJML was created in early 2015 by a team of Mailjet developers while they were working on Passport, Mailjet’s drag-and-drop interface for creating responsive emails. Having been knee deep in email for five years, the Mailjet team saw two things: a) email HTML is antiquated and not developer friendly b) a growing trend of email being viewed on mobile and tablet and the number of screens is only increasing. This means that finding a way to code responsive email easily and quickly is pretty important. The team started by creating a new markup language that would abstract the complexity of responsive HTML and automatically generate it. And that’s how MJML was born.

After learning so much from our users, we wanted to give back to the community by sharing this open-source framework to make responsive email easier and redefine the coding experience once and for all.

It works in the same vein as revealjs.¹
You install the tool and use their semantic markup to write a document.
The MJML cli tool, in this case, then renders it to email worthy HTML.
The markup is simple and well thought out. Writing it is a breeze.
I used Timo Reymann’s MJML plugin for Jetbrains editors to help me write, which makes things even easier, since it let’s me preview my work live.

I took one of their pretty templates, Recast and then stripped it down to meet my needs and match it as closely as I could to my old customised Antwort template.

Now all I do, is write, copy the HTML into the sendy editor and send. Life is good!