The core of our platform is delivering data and insights that inspire confidence. Following our platform's recent visual overhaul — detailed in our post, Modernizing Addepar: How we're taking a client-first approach to redesigning our platform — we wanted to build on that momentum in the 2025 Hackathon. We turned our attention to a critical, high-touch element: client-facing emails.

Recognizing the need for greater trust

Emails are a regular, essential touchpoint for our clients, often serving as the very first point of exposure to their client’s Portal experience. While exploring project ideas for the 2025 Hackathon, we recognized the Portal emails didn’t reflect the recently redesigned Client Portal experience, which now has a modern and cohesive design. We saw this as a significant opportunity to not only align the entire Portal experience but also build trust. In a landscape of rising phishing scams, trust is increasingly paramount and a concern for many of our users. The previous email templates looked outdated, they were disconnected from firm branding and featured overly wordy content. For some, this created ambiguity, which made it easy to mistake these emails as phishing attempts.

Delivering a modern, trusted email experience

To tackle this problem, our team modernized the entire email template system. The primary goal was to better reflect the Portal branding. Branding alignment ensures a strong, immediate connection to legitimacy and trust. This modernization effort unlocked several key improvements:

  • Centralized branding: We streamlined Portal setup by centralizing all branding configuration. This means that Portal branding is now leveraged in the automated emails. Eliminating the need for separate formatting and styling saves time and ensures consistency. We also added support for team-level branding, a critical component for firms that do business under multiple brands.

  • Optimal mobile experience: We thoroughly updated the underlying code to ensure flawless display and responsiveness across the most popular mobile email apps. This is paired with mobile deep linking to the Files page. If a client has the app installed, the link will take them directly into the app — a far more seamless experience than defaulting to the website. These emails now have a smoother, more reliable experience — whether from phone, tablet or desktop. 

  • Professional communication: We refined the content to be simpler and direct, so clients immediately grasp the message and necessary action. The result is faster, more effective communication.

Email content is now simple and direct, so it’s easy to understand the message and take necessary action.

Solving technical challenges

Refreshing our email designs offered a unique engineering opportunity. Despite their seemingly simple nature, achieving a polished, consistent experience across email clients is a technically robust endeavor. Through thoughtful engineering, we found a way to deliver a unified and seamless experience across an intricate system architecture.

Building for universal email compatibility

One of the core engineering challenges was navigating the quirks of HTML email development. Unlike modern websites, email clients such as Outlook and Gmail don’t support many modern web standards, including newer layout features like Flexbox or relative positioning. This meant that instead of using modern, efficiency-boosting development approaches, we had to resort to old-school HTML tables for layout, which ensures stability across all clients. 

Additionally, because our existing back-end system maintained the email templates, using external libraries like Tailwind would have required a significant overhaul of our build processes, so we opted for a more foundational approach. 

To solve this, we crafted robust, table-based layouts to guarantee stability and a professional look across all email clients. This meant writing resilient code to handle tricky cases like gradients in Gmail, and designing layouts that still look great even when modern CSS features aren’t supported.

Put simply, it was like building a complex structure with only the most basic tools, guaranteeing it stands strong everywhere.

A single source of truth for branding

Next, we focused on aligning Client Portal branding with automated emails. Here, we faced a significant architectural challenge: the system that shows the email preview is entirely separate from the system that sends the final email. 

This required us to maintain two distinct templates — one for the frontend preview and one for the backend — built using different templating languages (programming tools used to assemble the final HTML). The core problem was ensuring that these two separate files produced the exact same look and feel. Maintaining these highly similar, yet technically distinct, templates introduced a high risk of inconsistency and made manual updates extremely inefficient.

We solved this by creating a "single source of truth" for all email branding and transforming the development process. Now, our team edits one master design file. A custom transformation script then automatically converts this file into the specific formats required by both the preview system (front end) and the sending system (back end). 

This process guarantees that email branding remains consistent from preview to inbox. As an added benefit, it eliminates the need to manually update two templates, making the system far easier to maintain and update down the road, and saving significant engineering time.

Seamless mobile integration

Finally, we improved the mobile experience by adding support for universal links. Now, when a client with the mobile app installed taps a document link, it opens directly in the app instead of a web browser. This change delivers a faster, more integrated and far more efficient experience for clients on their phones or tablets.

Reinforcing trust in every touchpoint

This project embodies our dedication to our clients, their brand integrity and the details that create lasting trust. Even a seemingly small enhancement like this streamlines workflows and reinforces the relationships our clients have with their clients. This focus on every detail is how we help clients earn more of what matters most: trust, respect and value that can’t be calculated.