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

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.

Written by Alex Dunae at Dialect. Copyright 2022.

Deployed by Hussnain Sheikh