Any way to add padding to left and right?

Hi there @woody24,

Thanks for reaching out, and sorry to hear you’ve been experiencing frustration with your email design.

First, let’s talk about your Abandoned Cart emails. Can you explain more about what’s not working for you? Are they not sending out, or is the issue with the design here? Can you explain more about what functionality you were hoping would be here, but is missing?

Second, about padding for your emails – are these things like newsletters where you are designing one in MailPoet? Or are these automated emails that are going out, such as WooCommerce order confirmation emails?

In general, our templates have a fixed width so when delivered or viewed in a browser, they do not run off of the left and right margins. As well, adding blocks to your design such as a header or paragraph should come with margins on the text for readability.

Can you confirm:

• what type of email you are trying to create and send
• specifically which template you chose to work from for your design
• whether the issue with text reaching the margins is seen on the design page on the back end, or when delivered as an email, or both
• please double check your design using the “Preview” button in the top right corner on the design screen to view it as a desktop layout, mobile layout, and also to email yourself a test email
• if the issue is with the delivered email, can you also confirm the email software you are using to view the email? Does the email look better if you click the “view in browser” button at the top?

Thanks for that additional information!

To answer your questions first.

I’m trying to create any kind of email. Newsletter, automatic signup emails, followups after purchase, etc.

I’ve tried numerous templates, but starting from the basic one so that I can customize it the way I want.

The margins are everywhere. Designing and sent.

The only way to make the emails look better is if we have control over the padding. I understand that email needs to be set to a certain width, that’s not the problem. You can still add padding inside of that. So lets say your emails are set to a width of 660px, which it looks like they are. Which I’d feel more comfortable if that was just 600px to be more universally accepted. What I’m wanting to do is add 50px of margin. So that the body text has a width of 560px in your preset size. Right now the margin are only set to 20px. I’d like to see more breathing room between the text and the email container for readability and just overall better-looking design.

In Mailchimp, they do not have a WYSIWYG way to add padding, but they do allow you to modify the code inside each block, so I’m able to add the padding that I want.

As for the abandoned cart emails, I realize that your system just doesn’t work the way I expected it to work. The selling points on the website only state that Mailpoet sends out abandoned cart emails. Not that in order for them to work, the person has to have already been subscribed to your newsletter and interacted with it before an email can be sent. I would have expected this work for anyone who enters their email in the checkout process, whether they already be known to the system or not. I’m currently using another 3rd party plugin that allows for this, but it would be nice if I could merge everything into one system.

So as it currently stands, nothing is broken with Mailpoet, it just needs more flexibility for me to consider using it.

Hi @woody24,

Thanks for clarifying and glad to hear you’ve been able to find some workarounds on the padding issue. While our editor is currently limited in options like these, we are actively working on replacing the MailPoet editor with a Guternberg-block-based version that should allow for greater flexibilty and control over your email design. We do not have a fixed ETA for this support but the project is in active development and testing.

As for the cart abandonment emails, yes, in order to keep with our high standards of consent, ensuring that your brand is protected from spam complaints and potential GDPR violations, we only send these out to existing WooCommerce customers on your site who have registered for emails.

More here:
https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/woocommerce-abandoned-cart-emails/

While this may seem limited, it does help keep your brand safe and ensures that only the most engaged – and therefore most likely to return – customers are notified.

@woody24 didn’t find a workaround?

Facing same issue. I too would like to change the default width to 600px and increase the left and right padding from 20px to 50px.

The only way I found was by overriding the values in the following file (presumably this gets overritten on update – any way to make this permanent/maintain the override?)

wp-content/plugins/mailpoet/lib/Newsletter/Renderer/Template.html

Just for info the other approach I took was to use a hook to update the email template on the fly just before it sent. See example below:

add_filter('mailpoet_rendering_post_process', 'mailpoet_modify_content', 10, 1);

function mailpoet_modify_content( $email_template ) {	
  $find = [
    660', 
    'padding-left:20px;padding-right:20px', 
  ];
  $replacement = [
    '600', 
    'padding-left:7%;padding-right:7%', 
  ];
  $email_template = str_replace($find, $replacement, $email_template);
  return $email_template;
}

@dgilfillan Nice. Glad you found a workaround. I ended up abandoning MailPoet. It was too restrictive for me, and made no sense on why they were doing things. I get that it’s to comply with stuff, but when other bigger services were doing what I wanted, I decided to find a different service to use. Which was a shame because I liked how MailPoet integrated with WordPress.