Premailer

Pre-flight for HTML email.

Many thanks to Campaign Monitor, Premailer’s sponsor. They do all this inline CSS voodoo automatically each time you send a message, and their interface is pretty, easy and powerful. If you haven't checked them out yet we heartily recommend you do.

What is this?

For the best HTML e-mail delivery results, CSS should be inline. This is a huge pain and a simple newsletter becomes un-managable very quickly. This script is our solution.

CSS styles are converted to inline style attributes
Checks style and link[rel=stylesheet] tags and preserves existing inline attributes
Relative paths are converted to absolute paths
Checks links in href, src and CSS url('')
CSS properties are checked against e-mail client capabilities
Based on the Email Standards Project’s guides
A plain text version is created

A few things to note:

Things can get messy very quickly with the * selector—be careful
Only the screen, handheld and all media types are processed

Bookmarklet

If you’re using Firefox 3+, you can use a bookmarklet as a shortcut to processing pages.

To install, drag this link up to your toolbar: Premailer

Premailer API

A beta API for Premailer is now available. See the API documentation for details.

Under the hood

The current version, 1.7.3, has a new home and active development has resumed. Please update your bookmarks to http://premailer.dialect.ca/.

Updates are announced at http://twitter.com/TheCHANGELOG.

Premailer is written in Ruby, with a lot of help from Nokogiri, Hpricot and the Sinatra framework (goodbye eruby). The source is available on GitHub. Please file a bug report if anything goes haywire.

Get in touch with us