[rodriguezcommaj]

You should look into http://www.stampready.net - along with Campaign Monitor's email builder (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/create-custom-email...), it's one of the best drag-and-drop tools for creating really good, responsive emails. The problem with any of these tools is that they still spit out sometimes convoluted code, but that can't really be avoided since they need to cover their asses in literally dozens of different popular email clients.

If you're looking to code, you should check out Litmus Builder (http://litmus.com/email-builder), a code editor specifically built for email design. Has a bunch of templates available, instant previews in a bunch of different clients, email-specific CSS inlining, etc. Full disclosure: I work at Litmus, but even if I didn't, I'd still use Builder for the previews alone.

[poxrud]

Thanks. Do these support responsive emails on the gmail android client? Unfortunately the gmail client does not support media queries, which makes building a responsive email for it very difficult.

[rodriguezcommaj]

That's a good question. I'm not sure about StampReady, but Campaign Monitor has a few of the best email designers in the biz working there (namely Nicole Merlin and Stig Morten Myre) who strive for really robust templates. Nicole in particular has written about her approach (typically called 'hybrid' or 'spongey' development), which works without media queries. It's basically using fluid tables, max-width, and MSO conditional tables to get things working and is the best approach around these days. You can read more about it here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-a-future-pr...

I wouldn't be surprised if Campaign Monitor's email templates built in their builder follow the same approach. MailChimp's too, for that matter. The team there use similar techniques.

[herbst]

Mobile first :)

[brightball]

Thanks for this.