Email and Reusable Content in Drawloop

I have been WAITING for Email in Drawloop for about 2 years now. Yep 4/12/2014 is when I specifically requested it from Drawlop. So, does it work. Let's see. Here is the blog post. Here are the help docs.

Scenario

You know how HTML Emails in Salesforce are completely ridiculous, right? Well Visualforce emails are great (See Emails), but they are a lot of work, and people who don't know HTML are scared off by them. (Oh, and I don't do VF Emails with Apex Controllers - just the standard controllers, so it's not like there is deployable code or anything).  

I have really extensively coded VF emails that have lots of If / Then statements - IF this field is true on the record, then show this paragraph etc. This is for event management and they need to know lots of different things that are different about every event. So some "flags" are on the Contact, some on the Campaign and some on the Event Registration object. 

Now, If / Then statements in Word are going to be just as complex, but Drawloop now has the Component Library I'm going to see if this makes it easier. But what's the bet you can't have merge fields in components. And what's the bet that the word formatting is going to interfere or be different to the HTML formatting. 

Rules

Here are my rules for emails. 

• NO CALIBRI - make your document plain Arial BEFORE you start. Modify the Normal Style. Go for Arial 10. 

Setting up the Document

• The blog post says nothing special is required. The help doc says include all your text in a single cell table. 
• The help doc says images must be embedded in the file - hmm, I hope that means I can merge images in. I need my letterhead logo. 
  • Embeded images work. HOWEVER, they do not download in the sent email. HOW is this meant to work? 
    
    

Steps

• Use the wizard to create a basic DDP - oops sorry, Document Package now. 
• Set the document properties to send as an Email Body - this is the main thing that makes it an email. This is in that weird cog icon in the weird flash based part of the screen. I do hope they fix this in Lightning. 

• Add a few fields to your word document and re-upload it. 
• Read the instructions - set the word document as the Email Template - IMPORTANT! 
  • The Select Email Template screen has now changed, and you can choose a document or an email as a template. Cool. 
• Test the email. 
  • And NOPE, I get an error and can't continue. 
  • Include this Error Id if you contact Drawloop Support: 68bf795f-17c5-4d1e-8017-32c9df895687
  • Off to Drawloop Support. 
  • Of course I could not let this go, and tried and tried again. 
  • It works from Contacts. So let's continue working this from Contacts.
    
• And as I thought, it's UGLY. UGLY. UGLY.