Fully-managed react-email, inside Resend

[thiskevinwang]

Goals

1. As a designer and/or engineer I want to be able to iterate on a template, via some form of react-email, directly inside Resend
   • templates should have revision history, drafts, and be branchable — think planetscale/neon db branching
   • templates should have an ID
   • templates should expect a JSON props interface
2. As an engineer, I want to be able to send an email by simply passing an apikey, template_ID, and a JSON blob that satisfies the interface from above, to Resend.

Background

At Clerk, we have a go backend which is also where a lot of SQL queries happen, for customer data. This customer data is eventually injected into .txt email templates (today), and maybe soon,react-email-outputted HTML templates.

• using Resend's simple go SDK here is a great DX

In a separate playground repo, i'm using react-email and setting various strings in rendered HTML like {{thing}} so that resulting output can be used as a template in our go backend's template engine of choice (ie. handlebars).

• this awkward step of outputting, HTML, and pasting it into the go codebase is an awkward DX

It would be nice to eliminate this separate repo, and lean into Resend as platform more. 😍

Proposal

This should exist as a fully-managed feature.

[gabrielmfern]

I like the ideas a lot!
When you say having the templates on Resend, do you mean the actual HTML or the actual component code for like react-email?

Also, would you find it easier to iterate on the emails from Resend, or from your local codebase? I ask that because a nice idea that maybe might solve this for you, would be to have some sort of SDK for each kind of back-end language that helps render the emails even with passing props into the components. A @react-email/render for most back-end languages I mean.

[shahriyardx]

Like codepen where we can write the code and see the preview, then send it to someone? That would be great, when I heared about resend, I thought they might have this, but actually not

[gabrielmfern]

Bit of an update to this, Zeno and Bu talked about something like this on their Q&A