When I first got introduced to email development, I remember I wanted to throw myself off a cliff. I couldn't believe how nonsensical everything was. I kept track of everything in a little text document, which I've now turned into a post.
If you happen to be starting out with emails, I hope this can get you up to speed with exactly how everything is fucked. And if you're an Outlook survivor, I hope you'll find something you can relate to…
Since you mention MJML: I wrote a little tool called mjmgr which was meant to be a prototype of a MJML email manager for a bunch of providers. So that you can keep the source code of the MJML email checked in, but deploy it as compiled templates across various email template providers.
I only really did sendgrid and mailgun, but as a POC it worked well. Just putting this out there because it's useful but I don't touch it much anymore.
This is cool! My CMS (Craft CMS) has an MJML plugin as well as some good inlining plugins, making it possible to build emails using the CMS as the base. My goal was to have a system that put email templating on equal ground to content display, and MJML was a really key part of that. Love seeing the cool ideas MJML has inspired in the ecosystem.
For the most part you can kind of have header and a footer which you reuse across all email and then just more or less text in the middle. Maybe an image every once in a while. If you can get business partners to agree to that I've found that to be an ideal middle ground.
If you happen to be starting out with emails, I hope this can get you up to speed with exactly how everything is fucked. And if you're an Outlook survivor, I hope you'll find something you can relate to…