Newsletter · Warm

It opens: "The Quiet Word A weekly letter for people who write Featured this week On Writing Through the Fog Most of what we write in a given week never sees daylight, and that is exactly as it should be. Our contributor...". Preheader: "On writing through the fog, and why the bad drafts still count.". Links: "Read the full story", "The Case for Writing Your Worst Sentence First", "Writing in Small Rooms", "Five Slim Books to Steal From". 1 image, 1 Outlook-only block, no dark-mode query, system fonts.

The spread is what matters on this template: 100 in Superhuman against 88 in Outlook Classic, a 12-point gap across the same file. 15 of the 21 clients render it without a single flagged property. Outlook Classic is the one to preview against after any edit, because it is where this template has the least margin, and the 77 warnings behind that score are concentrated there rather than spread evenly.

At 7.4KB compiled it has roughly 95KB of headroom before Gmail clips the message at 102KB and hides the rest behind a "View entire message" link. Inlined CSS and base64 images both count toward that, so watch it as you add sections.

Safe to customise: Section order, imagery and the number of stories. Newsletters are the one format readers scan rather than read, so the running order matters more than the copy inside any single block.

Leave alone: The single-column fallback below the media query. Outlook on Windows ignores the query entirely and renders whatever the table structure says, so a layout that only works inside the breakpoint collapses there.

Modified it? Check your version against the same 21 clients.