The all-new HTML Mail app lets you compose and send emails using the new Gmail API. You can sign-in with your Gmail account and compose emails using the WYSIWYG editor, or if you are comfortable with code, switch to the HTML mode and write messages in HTML and CSS directly.

The HTML Mail app sends emails using your own Gmail account but unlike the previous versions, it does not require full access to your Google Account. It only needs permission to compose and send messages on your behalf and would not be able to read anything else in your mailbox. The app is open-source but you can always revoke access from your Google Accounts page.

Why should I use HTML Mail

While Gmail itself offers an excellent visual editor for composing emails, the big difference between Gmail and HTML Mail is that the latter lets you write and style emails in HTML directly. For instance, there’s currently no way to insert a table in Gmail’s but you can easily do that in the HTML Mail app - either use the Table tool from the toolbar or switch to the code view and add the <table> tag manually.

Also, if the Gmail.com website ever goes down in the future even for a few minutes, it happens sometime, you should still be able to use the HTML Mail app to at least send messages via your Gmail account during that downtime.

If you wish to embed images, or even social media icons, in your email messages, you can upload them to a site like imgur.com and put the URL of the uploaded image into the “Insert Image” box.

Once you are done composing an email message in the HTML Mail app, enter the subject and the recipient’s email address and hit Send Email. The number of emails that can send per day is the same as your daily Gmail limit.

And there’s a full screen mode as well to help you write emails in a distraction free zone. The visual editor is internally powered by TinyMCE with some CSS tweaks.