I created this project to easily send out generated emails to users with their new login information. This is being used ahead of a transition from one email provider to Microsoft Exchange hosted in the cloud.

I used MJML to create a responsive email template and then used Python to loop through a CSV file to send out the credentials with the template.

Once you've cloned the repo you need two things: MJML and the Python implementation of dotenv.

I've opted to install MJML globally with npm i -g mjml which allows me to use the CLI.

To use python-dotenv run pip install python-dotenv.

Once you have everything installed create a .env file to place the NOREPLY_PASS environment variable in and you should be good to go.

To build the email template use npm run build, you can also have it watch the .mjml file for changes and auto-generate with npm run watch.

I originally tried to code the email template by hand, until I realized that every email client implements their own HTML/CSS parsing (let's not even talk about Microsoft Outlook not supporting border-radius in 2023). This is exactly what transpilers were made for, and MJML was good enough for what I needed.

If I needed to code a responsive email template in the future, I'll probably use a different framework. I ran into 2 issues while throwing this together that weren't massively detrimental but still annoyed me. The first was a bug where if you have too many mj-text elements (it almost seemed arbitrary) in a column a random border or gap will appear. The other issue was not being able to group elements together in anything besides a column/section. Wrappers exist for sections, and groups for columns - but I needed something to group mj-text elements, have the individual text elements align to the left, but the container itself to the center. This can't be done as far as I can tell.

All-in-all, it will get the job done, and it wasn't too hard to build.