The mail room moves in: e-mail accounts and templates with placeholders

When we presented contact management two days ago, a promise stood at the end: it would be the foundation on which e-mail would be built next. Today we deliver the first part of it. The estate agent software has been given a mail room — the e-mail dispatch of the property management: accounts it can send from, and templates it builds its messages from.

Every website gets its sender

Whoever runs several websites writes under several names: the inquiry through musterhaus-immobilien.de should be answered from there, not from the sister domain next door. That is why the new account management orders its e-mail accounts by domain — the tree on the left shows the domains, the list on the right the accounts below them. No artificial categories, no maintenance of a second ordering system: the domain sits in the sender address, and the tree builds itself from it.

Behind that stands a simple rule that makes much easier later: the sender address is the signpost. When the website wants to send an e-mail, it looks for the sender address — and finds its account, with everything that belongs to sending. That is why each address may be given out only once; the server watches over it.

A word on the passwords, because it matters to us: they are stored encrypted and never travel back to the workplace. Whoever opens an account sees an empty password field — not because the password is missing, but because it has no business being there. And whether everything is right is not checked by hoping but at the press of a button: a test message leaves the house through the real account and lands in the real mailbox.

Letterhead for the machine

The second part is template management — the letterhead of the house. Every template has a subject, a designed version and a plain text version for recipients whose mailbox dislikes design. Writing happens in the same visual editor that website maintenance uses; whoever prefers to look at the source switches tabs. A separate style tab gives the template its clothing, and the writing surface wears it immediately — what you see while writing is the mail that arrives.

Added to that are fixed attachments from the media library: the terms as a PDF, the exposé supplement, whatever belongs to every message of that kind. And of course images — a logo at the head of the mail is no longer a piece of handicraft but a click into the library. On sending, the images travel inside the message itself so that they do not arrive as empty frames at the recipient.

Placeholders: the template does not know its moment

A template does not know who will receive it one day. That is why you write placeholders at the open spots — small marks in curly brackets that are only filled on sending: the name of the account, the date, later the recipient, the property, the appointment. The mechanism behind it is deliberately general: every part of the application can contribute its own placeholders, and template management shows them in a list for inserting — a double click and the mark stands in the text. If a placeholder stays unknown, it is not silently swallowed but remains visibly in place — an error you can see is an error you can find.

There are two kinds of template. Your own — freely created, freely grouped in a tree of the kind you know from contact management. And the built-in ones: templates the application uses itself, for example for the test message. Those you may redesign to your heart's content, but not delete — the application needs them, after all. And for all the others: a template that is in use somewhere speaks up when you try to delete it, instead of leaving a hole without comment.

Two finds from the workshop

The first find cost us an evening. The editor's writing surface is — technically speaking — a small, strictly sealed window into a world of its own. A logo from the media library, however, belongs to the world of the application, and the writing surface cannot reach it: it showed a symbol for a missing image. The first attempt, baking the image into the text itself, worked — and made the editor as slow as syrup. The second attempt, intercepting the writing surface's requests, failed quietly: the interception point was simply never asked. What solved it in the end was an intercom: the writing surface asks the application for every image, the application fetches it calmly in the background — without halting the interface — and hands it over. In the saved text there is still only the slim reference, never the image itself.

The second find is smaller, but everybody would have noticed it: the inserted placeholder always landed at the end of the text instead of at the cursor. Now the editor inserts it where you are writing — as if you had typed it. Small things like this decide whether a tool feels good or merely functions.

The balance

Accounts and templates are the equipment — the first to use them will be the test message and soon the website's contact form, whose answers will then come from a template you design yourself. Everything delivered complete as usual: data model, server and desktop client, the tests green, the code analysis without findings. The mail room has moved in — now it gradually gets its assignments.