How it works

A newsletter is a letter. You write one, it goes to the people who asked for it, and a copy stays where anyone can read it.

Writing

Issues are written in Markdown, with a preview beside the editor showing what will land in an inbox. Headings, links, lists, quotes, images, and emphasis — the formatting a letter actually needs.

There is no visual builder and no template gallery. Those exist to produce the layouts that Gmail clips, Outlook mangles and screen readers cannot follow. A newsletter that reads like a letter avoids the whole category of problem, and is what most people want to receive.

Before you send to anyone else, you can send the issue to yourself. It goes through the identical pipeline the real send uses — same rendering, same headers, same footer — so what you check is what your readers will get.

Your list

Subscribers arrive three ways: imported from a CSV, through a hosted signup page we give you a link to, or through a small form you embed on your own site.

Every subscription is confirmed by email before it is active. Double opt-in is not a setting to be switched off. Someone who has not clicked the confirmation link is never sent an issue, which is what makes consent defensible if it is ever questioned — and what keeps a typed-in address from turning into a complaint against your domain.

Unsubscribing works from a link unique to that subscriber, and takes effect immediately without a login, a survey, or a "are you sure" page. A person who has unsubscribed cannot be re-added silently; they have to confirm again, the same as anyone new.

Sending

When you send, we count the recipients and reserve that many credits before the first email leaves. If your balance will not cover the whole issue, the send is refused and nothing changes. Why it works that way.

Four things are added to every message as it is rendered, rather than left to whoever writes a template:

• An unsubscribe link built from that subscriber's own token
• List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers, so Gmail and Apple Mail can offer one-click unsubscribe in their own interface
• Your postal address, which US law requires in commercial email — and which is why an account cannot send until it has one on file
• A link to the issue's public page, for readers whose client makes a mess of it

These are the things that get a sending domain blocked when they are missing, so they are not optional and not configurable.

The archive

Every issue also gets a permanent public URL, an index page listing them, and an RSS feed. An issue can be linked to from anywhere, read by someone who is not subscribed, and found later by a search engine.

A newsletter that exists only in inboxes is a newsletter nobody can find. You can keep an individual issue off the archive when it should not be public.

What you see afterwards

Per issue: how many were sent, how many were accepted for delivery, how many bounced, how many were reported as spam, and how many unsubscribed.

Hard bounces and spam complaints move that subscriber to a suppression list automatically. This matters more than it sounds: continuing to send to addresses that already bounced is the most common way a sending reputation is lost, and it should not be a chore you have to remember.

You will not see open rates or click rates, because we do not collect either. That is deliberate, and here is why.