
BeeFree email editor (beefree.io)
211 points by massiarri on Oct 18, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 52 comments

Massive props for letting me play around with it without having to sign up or enter any data.

Thank you! Yes, we want to reduce the time to get in to ... zero :-) If you have any suggestions on the editor, please post on http://forum.beefree.io/

Free online email editor: we made it free to gather feedback and try to build the best email editor around, over time. Take a minute to check it out and let us know what you think!

There is no privacy policy. I don't know if what I enter ends up on your servers (or any of filepicker.io, fonts.net, jsdeliv.net, mailup.it (ok, that's you) and of course the obligatory infestation of google analytics and cloudfront). Is it all local?

Speaking of Google Analytics and privacy policy, you may want to take a look at Section 7: http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html

What's the issue?


How many sites actually do that?

It's good. Really good. I just made a quick test on using your service and it's completly frictionless to use both the editor and the site itself.

Great to hear!!

I've been looking for a good email editor for a while now. Any chance of BeeFree being embeddable, either as a service or open source?

This! My app's clients would love this vs the tinymce type editor we currently are giving them.

Great feedback. It sounds like we need to raise the priority on this :-)

Yes. Definitely on the roadmap. Still trying to figure out the best way to put it out as an embeddable widget.

Have you tested all the templates against services, like https://litmus.com, in terms of rendering across different mail clients? Also, great work!

We've done a lot of testing. We use Email On Acid (they're a partner of ours). It's hard to have 100% consistent results across all email clients and mobile devices (we're definitely not there yet), but we're pretty happy with the overall results. If you see any issues, please post on http://forum.beefree.io/

Awesome, and will do!

I got this: Oops! Your version of Opera is not supported: please upgrade your browser.

Opera is heading to less than 1% market share for many desktop sites - it's unlikely that there will be much engineering time devoted to supporting it on most sites that are engineering-constrained (i.e. almost all of them). It's almost always a better idea to make your product more appealing to the other 99%.

Who's we? Are you planning to monetize in the future?

Is there a list out there of open-sourced stuff like this? I've been searching for such editors to embed on some of my projects, but with no luck yet.

Seconded. Or even if not open-source: to integrate this into my apps, my products would save shedloads of time.

Definitely agree. I'd love to see this integrated into Sendy, it would completely idiot proof the process.

Thirded, just about to ask this.

We do plan to have BeeFree as an embeddable widget. Not ready for that yet, but coming in the near future.

This particular application uses http://ckeditor.com/demo#inline

As a WYSIWYG editor it's very stable and popular.

Just integrated ckeditor to my own mailer app, but the extensions they have created on this Beefree editor is amazingly thought through!

Thank you! Our team had a lot of fun building this. It took several months of very hard work (and we have a lot more that we're going to do with it). Thanks again!

You should really prioritize making this embeddable, because if you don't do it soon, someone will open source it.

As we've been growing our SaaS service, Cronitor, i've been humbled by the effectiveness of simply written plain-text emails. A year ago I'd have said text emails were for luddites; now I'm an evangelist. That said, this looks like a very well done product and the HTML newsletter-style email isn't going anywhere. Congrats on shipping!

This is cool. Good work.

It does make me wonder though, what happened to plain text emails? I had to abandon my favourite email client (mutt) purely because I received too many html emails. And I'm not just talking about marketing emails. Those I don't care about. I'm talking about work emails from colleagues.

Email supports multiple MIME types, so if someone sends you an HTML email, they should also be converting that HTML into a text representation as well so you can choose (or your email client can choose) which version you want to read.

Converting from HTML to text isn't that difficult, there are a number of open source libraries that'll do it. The harder problem is if someone sends you an email with a lot of images or where the layout of content is important, which is why people typically use HTML, it's much harder to map those aspects to plain text.

They should, but they don't. That's the problem.

Every time I get a crappy text version of an email, I try to contact the company (via email or Twitter) to get them to care about text emails. Usually, I've received encouraging replies. It seems like marketing email services don't optimise text versions and companies don't even realise that. Probably because fewer people care about text versions.

I encourage you too, to send requests for better text emails if you care about this.

It's only a matter of time until someone open sources an editor like this or, probably more useful more most people, creates a service that embeds an email editor like this in your app.

It'll be interesting to see how much adoption it gets because I don't think it's the solution most people really want. IMO, something simpler like a Markdown / Bootstrap for email is the real solution -- something that takes a simpler syntax or simple HTML and compiles it into "email compatible" HTML.

The thing that really sucks about email design is that you are stuck with HTML circa the early 2000s. An abstraction layer that took care of those annoying details seems like the real way to go. Curious what others think.

Dealing with actual clients that sends e-mail campaigns, trying to get them to deal with Markdown would be an absolute disaster.

Then again, we have in-house editor similar to this (though less polished), and letting them use that is often also a disaster. We've found that making the templates more restrictive (give them places to type text, but not much more) tends to work best.

I agree 100%, even giving the client access to a simple WYSIWYG editor (think mailchimp, campaign monitor, exacttarget, etc) always end up in a nightmare is mis-aligned and wrongly sized graphics and text. Not to mention what happens on mobile and of course outlook's wonderful rendering.

We build a lot of emails and we don't allow our clients to touch anything. It's something I hate dealing with on all levels but the ROI can be incredible for some business's.

As a sidenote: BeeFree is a well-known Win9x malware : http://vxheavens.com/29a/29a-6/29a-6.402 .

Ouch, we had no idea. I guess it's too late now. Oh well, maybe we'll give a good reputation to a name that had a bad one :-)

Congrats on a cool product! Is it possible to expose this somehow as an RESTful API that people can POST to with the images as links, etc and get a link to the formed html? Is this on your roadmap?

This would be so nice in sending emails in an automated fashion.

Also, it is awesome to provide full functionality to test without jumping through signup hoops.

Thank you! Not having any signups was a top priority for us. As for exposing a RESTful API, yes! And considering the among of comments here that go in the same direction, we'll have to raise the priority on this BIG TIME!! Thanks so much for the feedback.

Oddities: 1. The keywords <meta> tag is missing a closing bracket on most if not all pages. 2. The main edit page has <link> tags located after the final </html> tag.

Thanks! We'll look into it.

Super neat.

The preview window lacks a way to scroll the view (you can do it in the mobile mockup but the desktop view has no scrollbar and using keyboard to scroll down is unconvenient)

a little OT, but related: is there a good Outlook or Office-composed email cleaner? something like HTMLpurify but that has enough knowledge of css/html to largely retain original layout?

i'm making a small web-based smtp/imap client for an internal app and there's a lot of crappy email in mailboxes that i'd want to clean before dumping them into the browser for display.

This is awesome! I would love to be able to install this on my own server, are there any plans for something like that?

Great! But the test email I sent was completely broken in android's gmail app =/

That was an issue with auto resize, but it was the default settings.

Yep. If I remember correctly, that's a tough one that we're still struggling with. BeeFree is very much a work in progress, so you'll definitely see some improvements in terms of email client rendering issues in the future. Thanks again for your feedback.

This is a nice project. I look forward to using it soon for some of my side projects.

Cool! If you have any suggestions, please post on http://forum.beefree.io/

This is freaking amazing. Just freaking brilliant.

Thank you!

Thanks so much for the kind words. It was a lot of work (and there's a lot of work ahead of us). This means a lot to the team! Thanks again.
