Creating Emails

​

Emails, the Tented way

If you’ve built a tent, you already know how to build an email: describe what you want, iterate in chat, and watch the preview update live. Every email Tented generates uses battle-tested HTML — bulletproof tables, MSO conditionals for Outlook, dark-mode hooks — so it renders cleanly across Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo, and friends.

​

Create your first email

1. Go to Email in the sidebar.
2. Click Add > Create Email.
3. Name your email, and optionally pick an approved template as your starting point.

You’ll land in the email editor: chat on the left, live preview on the right, with your default from name and address already filled in from email settings.

​

Ask for what you want

Describe the email in the chat box, the same way you’d brief a colleague:

“Write a friendly launch announcement for our new feature ‘Predictive Scheduling’. Include a hero headline, 3 short benefit bullets, and a call-to-action button linking to our site. Personalize the greeting with the recipient’s first name.”

Keep chatting to refine it — “make the tone more playful,” “swap the bullets for a comparison table,” “add a P.S. line.” Each request creates a new generation you can review or roll back.

​

Edit sections directly

Hover over any part of the email and you’ll see Click to edit — handy for quick text tweaks without a round-trip through the AI.

​

Subject lines, preheaders, and personalization

Fill in the Subject and Preheader fields in the header bar. A few niceties built in:

• The subject field has a 50-character guide — stay under it and your subject won’t get clipped on mobile.
• The {} Personalize button inserts personalization tokens — any standard or custom contact field, in the form {{contact.firstName}}. They work in the subject, preheader, and anywhere in the body. (Full token reference: Personalization Tokens.)
• Tokens resolve to an empty string when a contact is missing the value, so add a fallback for anything visible: {{contact.firstName:default=there}} renders as “there” when there’s no first name.
• Per-email From/Reply-to overrides: any email can use its own sender details instead of the workspace defaults.

Click Personalize and you’ll get a small builder — pick the field, set an optional default, and it inserts the token for you: To see personalization with real data, click Preview as and pick a contact — Tented uses their contact and activity data as context.

​

Check it on mobile (and in code)

• The mobile preview button renders your email at real device dimensions, with a device picker.
• Code mode (<>) shows the full HTML and a plain-text view. Advanced users can edit the code directly.

​

Generation history

The clock icon opens Generation History — every AI generation of this email, with Preview and Revert so you can compare and restore past versions, just like tents.

​

Approve it

Here’s the one concept that’s different from tents: emails must be approved before they can send. Approval freezes a known-good version — the one your blasts and flows will actually deliver. Click Approve in the top-right corner and confirm. A few things to know about approval:

• Your Emails list shows each email’s status — Draft or Approved.
• After approving, you can keep editing safely: draft changes aren’t included in sends until you click Approve Update.
• Blasts and flows only offer approved emails (or brand-new ones you compose inline).

​

What’s next?