This startup dependency feels bad to me (ignoring my distaste of pulling templates in general) because I think we should minimize our exposure to external errors. Suppose the content-server is unavailable or slow during the brief moment that we pull the first template. We've delayed startup until it times out and our data is borked. Suppose this is during a traffic spike; I've seen cascading failures triggered by less.

I think we should have a local copy that we `require` and then overwrite with the data from the template server as it comes in. It may be stale for a moment but could be useful in unpleasant scenarios.

I think the "easy" way is to commit a baseline set of templates to the repo and `require` them, then `mailer.js` can overwrite them in memory asynchronously. Optionally we could overwrite the baseline files too.

To sum up my concern, I don't want to block startup to load (remote) templates.