If, my most patient dear reader, you followed the feedletter tutorial in the previous post, you saw that we styled feedletter newsletters by starting up a development webserver, which would serve up HTML for an example newsletter.
This is still the best to get started styling your newsletters, because you can iteratively edit your untemplate, then just hit refresh in your web browser to very quickly play with your style and layout.
However, there are differences between how web browsers and e-mail clients render HTML. Getting things to look great in your browser, both at wide and mobile-like narrow widths, is not enough to guarantee that things will look good as emails, on desktop or mobile e-mail clients.
So, feedletter v0.0.8 now supports styling by e-mail.
Instead of firing up a webserver to preview your newsletter, if you give feedletter-style commands --from and --to arguments, an example e-mail will be sent. So you can now accurately preview and tweak exactly how newsletters will look in the mail clients they are actually sent to.
To put that more specifically, just replace a command like...
$ ./feedletter-style compose-single --subscribable-name lgm --port 45612
with
$ ./feedletter-style compose-single --subscribable-name lgm --from feedletter@mchange.com --to swaldman@mchange.com
No development webserver will be spun up. Instead, a sample e-mail will be sent.