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07.

Pretty Text Emails

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When we send an HTML email, we know that Mailer automatically generates a text version for us. Thanks Mailer! And, other than this extra style stuff on top... which we don't really want, it does a pretty good job! But we can make it even better - and remove those weird extra styles - with one simple command. Find your terminal and run:

composer require league/html-to-markdown

This is a library that's good at taking HTML and transforming it into Markdown... which, I know, seems like an odd thing to do... but it's super handy! As soon as you install it, Mailer will automatically use it to transform the HTML email into text. Well... it will transform the HTML to markdown... and it turns out that Markdown is a very attractive text format.

Check it out: on the site, go back, bump the email again, submit and... there's our new email. The HTML looks the same, but check out the text. Yea! First of all, the html-to-markdown library was smart enough to get rid of the CSS styles code. It also embedded the logo image on top... which may or may not be useful, but it does correctly represent the image & link.

The most important thing is that it turned the HTML into a nice structure: the header is obvious, bold content is inside asterisks and the line breaks are correct. Basically, we can now stop worrying about the text emails entirely: our emails will have them and they will look great.

Next, there are two ways to add an image to an email: linking to them or embedding them. Let's learn how to embed an image and when that's the best option.