// the take
A Grunt-based build pipeline for hand-coded HTML emails: compiles SCSS to CSS, assembles Handlebars templates with reusable partials, and inlines the CSS with Juice. Aimed at developers/designers who build transactional or marketing emails and want a local toolchain instead of writing table markup and inline styles by hand.
Covers the actual pain points of email markup end to end - SCSS compilation, a templating layer (Assemble/Handlebars) with partials and reusable components (buttons, dividers, notices), and automatic CSS inlining in one `grunt build` step. Ships a live-reload preview server (`grunt serve`) so you see rendered output in a browser without manually opening files. Includes working Mailgun and S3 tasks for firing test sends and hosting images, which most boilerplates leave as an exercise.
Built entirely on Grunt, which is effectively dead tooling - the 2024 update just bumped dependencies, it didn't modernize the build; you're stuck on an unmaintained plugin ecosystem (grunt-contrib-*). Litmus is listed as a topic/keyword but there's no actual Litmus integration in the Gruntfile - you still need a separate paid account for real client rendering tests. Secrets.json holds live Mailgun and S3 credentials in plaintext with only a README suggestion to encrypt it, no actual secret management. Single-maintainer project with no changelog entries addressing newer email client behavior (Outlook's Chromium-based renderer, dark mode handling), so the sample templates reflect older client assumptions.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →