Proposal: include premailer-rails

[joshmcarthur]

We frequently use template email layouts, typically Postmark's. These templates, and many others, advise using an email HTML preprocessor such as premailer to inline CSS onto the elements. Apparently using <style> tags and or <link rel="stylesheet" has mixed support in different email clients. Premailer can also generate plaintext versions of emails, which is a useful thing to do for accessibility/client support if plaintext templates are not provided by a developer.

Email layouts are something that is frequently disregarded or left until the last minute, so providing a sensible default here would also be useful. Just a single column with header and footer will take care of most projects' needs.

Premailer does not currently support webpacker, although there is a lengthy issue describing how support can be added for it. This doesn't currently impact my project since I'm using the Postmark template with an inline <style> tag, so this may or may not be an issue.

[eoinkelly]

Do we need to care about this being in Webpack?

My instinct is that we probably won't want to re-use stylesheets between the app and the inlined mail styles. Obviously these styles will be related but I think copy & paste is probably safer.

[eoinkelly]

This should probably be a new variant eh?

[eoinkelly]

Discussion outcome:

• We want premailer in this repo
• This should be a default part of the repo
• We don't care about Webpack integration for premailer.