Scott's personal thank-you email: the shell, waiting on Greta's two pictures

Elsie, 22 September 2026. NOTHING HAS BEEN SENT from this build and nothing will be until Scott has seen a render. No mailer, edge function or trigger has been touched. The earlier build he rejected three times is kept whole next door in ../play-welcome-rejected-2026-09-22/, with his three rejections quoted in its own README; one copy of THAT build reached his iCloud at 17:16:36 BST before the first rejection arrived (Resend id 01a0c9e7-a543-7284-81d5-59b925fdc5dc).

WHAT IS HERE

file	what it is
`STANDARD.md`	Read this first. His eight verbatim sentences, what each one rules out, the picture source rule and why it changed, the client constraints, the sender check.
`ART-BRIEF.md`	What Greta draws: two bespoke Grok scenes, exact pixel sizes, what each shows, the rules, and the palette left to her.
`welcome.html`	The letter shell, with a grey placeholder in each picture slot.
`welcome.txt`	The plain-text alternative.
`shell-render-600px.png`	What the shell looks like at 600 px today. It is a DRAFT render and says so: the two grey blocks are placeholders, not artwork.

THE STATE OF IT, honestly

The words are Iris's, draft 2 in Scott's own voice, with the transactional lines REMOVED on his sentence "this is a peronal email not a business transaction". That is an omission, never a rewrite: not one word of hers is changed. 104 words. Her draft 3 replaces this text the moment it lands in her report.
The legal footer is gone, on his sentence "remove registered in england footer". The email ends at his name.
The website's look is set aside, on his sentence "forget the look of the website". The shell is deliberately neutral: warm paper, dark ink, a serif letter face, one column, wide margins. Its few colours will be taken from Greta's finished pictures, which is why no palette is fixed yet.
The pictures do not exist yet. Two grey placeholders sit exactly where they go, at exactly the size they will be. When Greta's files land they are uploaded to r2:salus-mind/images/email/play-welcome/, read back over https, swapped in, and the whole thing is rendered again for Scott.
The sender is checked, not assumed. salus-mind.com is verified on Resend in eu-west-1, and Resend verifies a domain rather than an address, so Scott Ripley <[email protected]> can send with nothing further needed. The send script is deliberately NOT in this folder yet: there is nothing to send until the pictures and draft 3 are in.

THE SENDS, both of them, read back from Resend itself

id	time (BST)	subject	words
`01a0c9f3-111b-7413-96c0-466285799622`	17:29:05	[DRAFT for Scott] A personal thank you, from Scott	Iris draft 4 revision 3
`01a0c9f4-1565-7645-ba99-39a5101019c8`	17:30:11	[DRAFT for Scott] A quick thank you, from Scott	Iris draft 4 revision 4, the live one

Both from "Scott Ripley [email protected]", reply_to the same, to [email protected], both carrying Greta's two scenes. The second supersedes the first; the first is left on the record rather than pretended away. Revision 4 changed the subject ("quick" rather than "personal"), opened on "Thank you for giving it a go. It means a lot.", and contracted the letter throughout ("won't", "that's", "I've"), which is what a note to a friend actually sounds like.