Big Blue Ceiling

B2C Webmail

A lightweight HTML email sender for Gmail, with three interchangeable UIs and a CLI.

Eddie OffermannDesign and engineering

Role
Design and engineering
Areas
Tools, Apps

Sending a designed HTML email to a small group shouldn't need a marketing platform. B2C Webmail takes an HTML file, a subject and a saved recipient list, and sends one message through Gmail with every recipient in BCC.

Named lists can be saved, shown and deleted, and the recipient parser accepts bare addresses or the Name <address> form, separated by commas, new lines or both. Credentials use a Gmail app password rather than the account password.

Five-step flow in B2C Webmail: gather a saved list and any extra addresses, parse them by splitting on commas and new lines, accepting named or bare addresses and removing duplicates, build one HTML message addressed to the sender, send it once with every recipient in BCC, and report the addresses or a login error.
Recipients never see each other's addresses, because the visible To line is the sender's own.

What makes it a useful pattern is the split between core and interface. Configuration and sending live in two small modules, and three UIs sit on top: a native PyQt6 desktop app with a settings dialog, a React single-page app served by FastAPI with a settings drawer, and the original two-tab Gradio app. A command-line flag picks which one launches, and every operation in the UIs is also available as a CLI command. The React front end ships prebuilt, so no Node.js is needed to run it.

Four-layer diagram of B2C Webmail: a PyQt6 desktop app, a React app served by FastAPI, a Gradio app and a command line sit on a launcher in app.py, which calls two core modules, config.py for credentials and lists and mailer.py for parsing and sending, which delivers through Gmail's SMTP server over SSL with an app password.
Every interface calls the same two core modules, so a fix in sending reaches all of them at once.

Links

Sources

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