Why I Built MailViewr: A Founder's Story on HTML Email Pain

A developer's journey from frustration to building a free tool that solves a problem nobody wants to talk about Disclosure: I wrote this post and used ChatGPT to polish the writing. Per DEV guidelines, I'm disclosing that AI was used for editing and refinement while all the technical details and founder perspective are entirely from my own experience. The Problem I Lived Every Day I'm a developer. And before I built MailViewr, I was stuck in a pattern I've seen countless times across the industry. Someone from marketing or management would ping me on Slack: "Hey, can you put together an HTML email for this campaign? You know HTML, right?" And just like that—I'd become the email developer. Not because I wanted to. Not because I'd chosen to specialize in email. Just because the assumption was simple: HTML is HTML. If you can build a website, you can build an email. That assumption is dead wrong. The Moment I Decided to Build Something The turning point came after my email—one I'd spent h