The address your newsletter gets on day one

Every newsletter gets its own address at {slug}.issuemint.com the moment it is created, and the website behind it is live before you have been anywhere near DNS. Sending works from the same moment, so a first issue can go out on the day you sign up.

That address keeps working afterwards. Adding a domain of your own does not retire it, and removing the domain again puts your website straight back on it.

What is already live on that address

The whole newsletter website, not a placeholder. You get a home page carrying your signup form, an archive of everything you have sent, a page for each issue, a sponsor page, an RSS feed at /feed.xml, and the robots.txt and sitemap.xml that go with them. The reader submissions page is there too if you have switched submissions on. The pages you get covers each one, and the archive website is the shorter version of why it matters.

Your branding applies to all of it from the start: logo, colour and fonts are newsletter settings rather than website settings, so the site looks like yours on the issuemint.com address as much as on your own.

HTTPS is already on it, and there is nothing to renew

Every {slug}.issuemint.com address is served over HTTPS from the day it exists. There is no certificate to request, no record to add and no renewal date to write down. Certificates are only something you think about on a custom domain, where Issue Mint has to be able to prove the hostname is yours, and HTTPS on a custom domain explains what happens there.

Where the address comes from

The address is the web address you chose when the newsletter was created, and it lives in Settings, then the General tab, labelled Web address with .issuemint.com printed beside the field.

Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens only, and between three and sixty-three characters, because it becomes a hostname. A short list of names is reserved: anything Issue Mint uses for itself, such as www, app or docs, and anything that would read to a reader as Issue Mint speaking rather than you, such as login, secure or billing. The form says so rather than failing quietly.

What still runs on issuemint.com after you add a domain

Two things, and each one moves across on its own.

Click tracking runs on t.issuemint.com until the go record on your domain verifies, and then links in your issues come from go.yourdomain.com instead. Hosted issues are sent from news.issuemint.com until the DKIM and MAIL FROM records verify, and then they come from your own address and Issue Mint emails you to say so. The records page lists which record does which, and click tracking on your own domain is why the first of them is worth having.

What happens to the free address once a domain verifies

It becomes a redirect rather than a dead end. Once your custom domain verifies, Issue Mint treats that domain as the canonical address for the site, and a request to {slug}.issuemint.com is answered with a permanent redirect to the same path on your domain. An old link to an issue on the issuemint.com address still lands on that issue.

That is also why the address is worth keeping in mind rather than forgetting: it is the fallback the whole time your domain is being set up, and the address your site returns to if you ever remove the domain.

If you change the web address later

Changing it moves the site, and nothing redirects from the old address.

Issue Mint keeps no history of previous addresses, so anything already published or sent that pointed at the old one stops working the moment you save. The settings page says as much next to the field. On a newsletter with issues already out, changing the web address is a decision worth making once, and a custom domain is usually the better answer than a second attempt at a slug.