Rahul Somasunderam

Programmer, Cyclist, Trivia Junkie.

20 March 2013

If you’re working on any project that involves more than one developer and weeks or possibly months of work, you should be using some sort of Continuous Integration. The most common system to use is Jenkins.

If you start using Jenkins and start committing code often, you’ll realize you need email notifications on build status on each commit. The default emails from Jenkins are to put it mildly, a bit lacking.

The solution is, the Email-ext plugin. This lets you customize your emails. They have some decent templates in their code. However you’ll want to customize your emails further. I took the approach of taking their template and making it prettier with Zurb’s responsive email templates. I use Mail.app on the Mac and the Mail app on my iPhone. Things were going great until I committed something to github with my gmail id.

That’s when I learnt about GMail Grimace.

Rewriting all my templates to not use style tags was not an option. Changing the appearance of an html element using css classes that are variables in your template is super easy. Doing that using if conditions in your template, is a pain in the ass.

Then I ran into this SO. So I decided to use this information and create a pre-send script for the Email-ext plugin. However I learnt that there were some problems.

So I decided to hack the plugin to do what I want. It’s now part of v2.28.

All you need to do is create a style tag in your email with an additional attribute data-inline and value true.

<style type="text/css" data-inline="true">
  div.good {
  	background-color: blue;
  }
  div.bad {
  	background-color: red;
  }
</style>
<style type="text/css">
  ... more styles ...
</style>

The plugin now will take this css and apply it inline to all elements. This makes GMail happy.

Here’s my Jelly Template.

Jenkins, Email Ext and Gmail Grimace