Foundation for Emails

Foundation for Emails is an open-source responsive email framework from ZURB, the design agency behind the Foundation front-end framework. Originally released as Ink, it gives developers a grid system, a component library and a build toolchain for producing HTML emails that render consistently across desktop, webmail and mobile clients.

Its main feature is Inky, a templating language that replaces verbose nested-table markup with short semantic tags such as `<row>`, `<columns>` and `<button>`. A Gulp-based build process compiles Inky to table-based HTML, compiles Sass to CSS, and inlines the CSS so the finished email works in clients with limited style support, including older versions of Outlook.

The framework is aimed at developers who hand-code email rather than assemble it in a drag-and-drop editor. Because it only produces HTML, it is not tied to any particular email service provider — the compiled templates are uploaded to or pushed through whichever platform the sender uses.

Foundation for Emails is no longer actively developed by ZURB, but the framework remains freely available and is still widely used in existing email codebases.