Email Editor with Built In QA
Jason Charnes, Staff Product Developer at Podia, on building an email editor
The real product value here is risk reduction, not prettier email. Podia was building an editor that non technical users could rely on, so the bar was not just whether a template looked right in one inbox, but whether the generated HTML held up across Outlook, Gmail, mobile apps, and older clients. Litmus turned that into a repeatable QA process with screenshots, automated checks, and issue lists, which let the team ship with more confidence.
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Podia was not hand coding one campaign at a time. It built a WYSIWYG style editor that generated many email variations from the same underlying system. That made behind the scenes correctness more important, because one rendering bug could spread across many templates at once.
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The workflow combined two layers of validation. Can I Email helped decide which HTML and CSS features were safe to use in email at all, and Litmus checked the actual compiled output with previews and QA checks. In practice, that meant choosing older but safer patterns like inline styles, tables, and PNGs over newer web patterns.
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This sits in the middle of the email tools stack. Litmus is strongest as a testing and QA product, while tools like Parcel are built more for writing and collaborating on email code. Teams often use both, with Litmus as the final gate before send, especially for transactional or product driven emails.
The category is moving toward more automated guardrails inside the editor itself. The winning tools will not just preview an email after it is built, they will warn on unsupported code, accessibility problems, and brand drift while it is being assembled, so non specialists can produce emails that are safe to send at scale.