Editor and autosave
The builder is where you create and edit a template’s draft. Nothing you do in the builder changes what your application or ESP receives until you press Publish.
There is no Save button
Section titled “There is no Save button”Maiilo saves your draft automatically, about two seconds after each change, and again when you leave the page or switch tabs. The toolbar shows the save state:
- Saving… while a save is in progress.
- Saved with the time of the last save.
- Unsaved changes when an edit is waiting to be saved.
- Couldn’t save — retrying if a save failed. Maiilo keeps your changes and retries automatically, so nothing is dropped.
Opening a template without editing it saves nothing.
Draft and published version
Section titled “Draft and published version”Every template has one draft and, once you have published it, a published version:
| Draft | Published version | |
|---|---|---|
| Changes when | You edit in the builder (autosaved) | You press Publish |
| Served by the API | No | Yes |
| Pushed to SendGrid | No | Yes |
| Can be edited | Yes | No, it is frozen |
Editing a published template does not un-publish it. The API keeps serving the last published version while you work, and your edits go live the next time you publish. See Publishing and versions.
Building a template
Section titled “Building a template”- Sections hold your content. A section can have one, two or three columns.
- Elements go inside sections: Text, Image, Button, Spacer, Divider, and the Code Block (Pro).
- Click an element to select it and edit its properties in the inspector.
- Quick tools appear on the selected element or section: the most common style settings (such as alignment and colour), Move up, Move down, Duplicate, All settings and Delete. On a section, they also include Save to Block Library, which turns the section into a shared block.
- Drag elements and sections to reorder them, or drag new ones in from the sidebar.
- Undo and redo are in the toolbar.
Subject
Section titled “Subject”Set the subject with Edit details in the template’s options menu. It is optional while you build and publish, but SendGrid requires a subject before you can push. The subject can contain variables.
Preview, test and export
Section titled “Preview, test and export”- Preview renders the email with a Test data panel, so you can see it with sample values for your variables.
- Send test emails the template to an address you choose.
- Export gives you the HTML and variable list of the published version. A template that has never been published has nothing to export yet.
Output
Section titled “Output”Maiilo produces table-based HTML with inline styles, built to render consistently in Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and mobile clients. Templates imported as HTML are kept exactly as you wrote them. See Code Block and HTML import.