Brainstorming | Sending emails using "Rich Text Input"

I’d really love to have a way to send customized emails directly from my admin portal, where I use a layout like shown below(quick mock up). So, I’m about to embark on the journey of trying to pull it off:

In the “To:” line, it would be a “multi-drop down” where one of them is “all users”. If “all users” is chosen, it would send the same email individually to each user, not revealing anyone’s email to anyone else. My line of thinking would be to do this with an API workflow.

The “Subject” line would obviously be dynamic. That’s easy.

Now, what I’m also really curious about is if the body can be customized with the Rich Text Input and have it displayed in the recipients email the same way?

Has anyone tried this before?

Update: Wow! the Rich Text Input works!! Insane!

Hey @sounderly.help, that’s amazing… I am grappling with exactly the same question at exactly the same moment! I have a bunch of questions for the community, so I thought I’d post them here with yours…

Rich Text to Email - Storage in HTML or Rich Text Format?
It seems there are two ways to approach this, based around having your rich text stored in Bubble as:

  • Rich Text format
    So tags are [b]bold[/b] etc, but importantly, new lines are just a “Carriage Return” character. Hence a few paragraphs of plain text are compatible with this format.
  • HTML
    So simple tags are <b>bold</b>, but new lines are created by <p></p> tags. So a few paragraphs of plain text become just one and are incompatible.

For me, the challenge with storing my text in HTML format is that I’m building a complex messaging system where sections of text are concatenated together, and I really really don’t want to move the whole system over to being stored in HTML. Rich Text works with normal text, and is much more flexible.

Bubble Rich Text Editors
So far I have used two editors:

  1. The Bubble Rich Text Editor
    This reads and saves Rich Text format.
  2. Zeroqode’s RTE
    This appears to only read and save HMTL
    QUESTION 1 - @ZeroqodeSupport - is this true? Is there any option for it to read and write Rich Text format but also have an HTML export option?

Sendgrid Support for Rich Text Versus HTML
I’m playing around with Sendgrid at the moment. Click here to see a write-up I have just done on the details of how it can be set up. In summary, it can be set up in two ways:

  1. Through the Bubble integration
    Where you send emails with the Email -> Send Email action. I think this uses an SMTP link from Bubble to Sendgrid. This support Rich Text format beautifully, but has an annoying limitation regarding who the email looks like it has come from.

  2. Through the “Send Emails with Sendgrid” Plugin
    This fixes the “who the email has come from” issue, but no longer appears to support Rich Text. Hence you have to feed it HTML.
    AAAGH!

So Lots of Questions…

QUESTION 2 - is there a Rich Text to HTML converter anyone knows of?

QUESTION 3 - Would creating one with a bit of search and replace seem like a not too difficult task if the amount of markup allowed was constrained in some way?

QUESTION 4 - is there any other Bubble Rich Text editor out there which can read/write Rich Text format but also export HMTL?

QUESTION 5 - Is there any way to get Sendgrid to interpret Rich Text AND allow a customised “from address”?

QUESTION 6 - Does anyone know of any other email system we can link to which solves the problem?

QUESTION 7 - @neerja, @copilot and @romanmg, can your experience shine a light on these questions?

Here’s hoping for some debate!

Best wishes,
Antony. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Hey Anthony, I’ve got about a month to build a newsletter feature for a client, my research on the forum leads me to AWS… but the pricing sounds almost too good to be true Amazon Simple Email Service Pricing | Cloud Email Service | Amazon Web Services
I’ll have to use the API connector, but I’m feeling braver these days :slight_smile:

Curious if you have stuck with the default Bubble/Sendgrid combo or have “gone another way”
Cheers! :beers: