How to Send Rich HTML Emails from monday.com

You’re drafting an email automation in monday.com. You want to make the client’s name bold. You want to add bullet points for clarity. You want to format the event date as a heading. You want to include your company logo.

You open the email body field in a classic automation recipe and discover: plain text only. No formatting toolbar. No bold, no italic, no headings, no lists, no images, no links with custom anchor text. Just a plain text box where every character appears exactly as typed.

Your professional, formatted email becomes a wall of unformatted text that looks like it was sent from a 1990s terminal.

This was monday.com email automations for years: plain text only, no HTML formatting. monday.com first provided HTML only in its separate “Mass Email” feature. The New Automation Builder, rolling out from January to March 2026, now supports HTML formatting in the email body, and workflow Gmail and Outlook blocks accept HTML bodies (monday.com Help Center). monday.com’s own Integration blocks page still says Gmail can’t format text, so test before you rely on it.

As a certified monday.com partner managing workflows for 110+ clients, we’ve heard the same complaint dozens of times: “Why do our automated emails look so unprofessional?” The answer, until the New Automation Builder: classic monday.com email automations didn’t support the formatting that’s been standard in email for 25 years.

Limited Email Formatting in Classic Automations

Classic monday.com email automations send plain text emails with zero formatting options. You cannot:

• Make text bold, italic, or underlined
• Create headings for visual hierarchy
• Add bullet lists or numbered lists
• Insert images or logos
• Format links with custom anchor text (links appear as raw URLs)
• Add tables or structured layouts
• Use colours to highlight important information
• Include your brand styling or templates

This limitation affects every email use case where professional appearance matters:

• Client-facing communications (especially when using named CC groups)
• Vendor and partner emails
• Invoice and payment notifications
• Event confirmations and recaps
• Onboarding and welcome emails
• Status updates with formatted data
• Templated email sequences

Combined with limited sender name and reply-to control and no CC and BCC in monday.com email automations, plain text emails look unprofessional, reduce readability (especially on mobile), and eliminate the visual hierarchy that helps recipients quickly scan for key information.

HTML Arrived in Mass Email First

monday.com added HTML support to their Mass Email feature (part of the CRM product) first, but not to email automations at the time. (monday.com Help Center) Mass Email is a separate tool for sending bulk marketing emails — it doesn’t integrate with automation triggers, status changes, or button-click emails. Since then, HTML email bodies have arrived in the New Automation Builder and workflow email blocks, and monday campaigns (Enterprise) can send workflow-triggered campaign emails with a test send (monday.com Help Center).

What “Plain Text Only” Really Means

Here’s what happens when you try to format an email in a classic monday.com automation:

What you type:

Hi {First Name},

Your event is confirmed! Here are the details:

**Event Name:** {Event Name}
**Date:** {Event Date}
**Venue:** {Venue}

Next steps:
- Review the attached contract
- Submit your deposit by Friday
- Confirm your arrival time

Thanks!

What the recipient sees:

Hi John,

Your event is confirmed! Here are the details:

**Event Name:** Smith Wedding
**Date:** June 15, 2026
**Venue:** Grand Ballroom

Next steps:
- Review the attached contract
- Submit your deposit by Friday
- Confirm your arrival time

Thanks!

The asterisks, dashes, and line breaks appear exactly as typed. There is no bold, no actual bullet list formatting, no visual distinction between the heading and body text. It’s all plain text.

Why Plain Text Emails Hurt Professional Communication

Problem 1: Visual Hierarchy Is Lost

Formatted emails use headings, bold, and spacing to create visual hierarchy — your eye immediately finds the important information. Plain text eliminates this. Everything has the same visual weight, so recipients have to read every word to find what matters.

Impact: Lower engagement, higher chance of recipients missing critical information.

Problem 2: Lists Don’t Format Correctly

Bullet points and numbered lists created with dashes and numbers in plain text look amateurish and don’t render consistently across email clients. Mobile email apps often don’t respect plain-text spacing, so your carefully formatted list becomes a jumbled paragraph.

Impact: Reduced readability, especially on mobile devices.

Problem 3: Links Are Ugly and Untrustworthy

In plain text, links appear as raw URLs:

Click here to access your form: https://example.com/forms/abc123xyz789

In HTML, the same link becomes:

Click here to access your form: [Access Your Form]

Raw URLs are long, ugly, break across lines on mobile, and look suspicious (phishing emails often use raw URLs). Formatted links with anchor text look professional and trustworthy.

Impact: Lower click-through rates, recipients hesitant to click raw URLs.

Problem 4: No Branding or Visual Identity

Professional emails include company logos, brand colours, and templated layouts that reinforce brand identity. Plain text offers none of this — every email looks generic and indistinguishable from spam.

Impact: Reduced brand trust, emails perceived as less legitimate.

Problem 5: Data Tables Are Unreadable

If you need to include structured data (like a pricing breakdown or event schedule), plain text forces you to manually align columns using spaces:

Item Quantity Price ----------------------------------- Service A 2 $500 Service B 1 $1,200

This formatting breaks completely in email clients with variable-width fonts. HTML tables render consistently across all clients.

Impact: Confusion, recipients unable to parse structured data.

What Most Guides Don’t Tell You: Mobile Is Where Plain Text Breaks

Desktop email clients are somewhat forgiving of plain text — monospaced fonts and careful spacing can create readable layouts. Mobile email apps destroy plain text formatting.

• Line breaks and spacing are collapsed
• Manually aligned columns become jumbled
• Long URLs break across multiple lines unpredictably
• No visual separation between sections

Plain text automations create a poor mobile experience by default.

The Mass Email “Solution” Doesn’t Solve Automation Use Cases

monday.com’s Mass Email feature supports HTML. It includes:

• Visual drag-and-drop editor
• Rich formatting (bold, italic, headings, lists)
• Image and logo insertion
• Branded templates
• Merge fields for personalization

However, Mass Email is not part of the automation system. Mass Email is designed for bulk marketing sends — newsletters, announcements, campaigns. It doesn’t support:

• Triggered emails based on status changes
• Button-click-initiated emails
• Item-created or item-updated emails
• Conditional emails based on column values

If you want automated emails triggered by workflow events, Mass Email won’t do it — use the New Automation Builder or workflow email blocks for HTML bodies, or monday campaigns (Enterprise) for workflow-triggered campaign emails (monday.com Help Center).

How BoardBridge Solves This: Rich HTML Emails

BoardBridge — Form & Workflow Automation for monday.com — sends rich HTML emails, so formatting reaches the recipient as formatting rather than literal characters.

How It Works: Rich Text Email Composition

Formatting you can use:

• Bold and italic text
• Headings for visual hierarchy
• Bullet lists and numbered lists
• Hyperlinks with custom anchor text

Dynamic variables: Insert merge fields — like {{Client Name}} or {{Event Date}} — that get replaced with actual monday.com column values when the email is sent.

Example: Professional Event Confirmation Email

Composed in BoardBridge:

Hi {{Client Name}},

Your event is confirmed! Here are the details:

Event Information

• Event Name: {{Event Name}}
• Date: {{Event Date}}
• Venue: {{Venue}}
• Format: {{Show Format}}

Next Steps

1. Review your contract here: [View Contract]
2. Submit your 50% deposit by {{Deposit Due Date}}
3. Confirm your arrival time with our coordinator

If you have any questions, reply to this email or call us at {{Company Phone}}.

Thanks, {{Your Team Name}}

What the recipient sees: A properly formatted HTML email with bold headings, clickable links with anchor text, bullet and numbered lists, and all merge variables replaced with actual values from the monday.com item.

Compare this to the plain text version a classic monday.com automation would send — no bold, no clickable links, just raw text with asterisks and dashes.

Merge Variables for Personalization

BoardBridge email templates support personalization via merge variables:

• {{Client Name}} — pulled from the Name column
• {{Event Date}} — formatted from the Date column
• {{Venue}} — pulled from the Venue column
• {{FORM_URL_ShowForm}} — unique form link per item
• {{Custom Column Name}} — any monday.com column

When the email is sent, each variable is replaced with the corresponding value from the monday.com item. A form URL variable gives each item its own unique form link.

Example personalized email:

Hi {{First Name}},

Your {{Event Type}} on {{Event Date}} is confirmed. We’ve reserved {{Venue}} and your band lineup is finalized.

Please fill out your production requirements form by clicking here: {{FORM_URL_ProductionForm}}

Thanks, {{Coordinator Name}}

Every recipient gets a personalized email with their specific event details, all pulled automatically from monday.com.

Example: Client Communication Transformation

Take a company that sends 50+ automated emails per event — confirmations, reminders, form requests, status updates, and recaps. If all of them are plain text from classic monday.com automations, clients often reply asking for clarification because key information is buried in walls of text.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line: Professional Email Formatting Shouldn’t Be Optional

Email formatting has been standard since the late 1990s. Bold, headings, lists, images, and clickable links aren’t luxury features — they’re baseline expectations for professional communication.

Classic monday.com email automations send plain text that looks outdated, reduces readability, and eliminates the visual hierarchy that helps recipients quickly find key information. The limitation is particularly painful on mobile, where plain text formatting breaks completely.

The Mass Email feature provides HTML formatting, but it doesn’t integrate with automations. The New Automation Builder and workflow email blocks now accept HTML bodies, though monday.com’s own docs still conflict on Gmail formatting.

BoardBridge by TaskRhino sends rich HTML emails with bold, headings, lists and clickable links, with your monday.com item’s column values merged in, and can send them from a button on the item.

Need automated emails that look professional? Book a free 30-minute consultation: taskrhino.ca/contact-us