Sending an issue now

Send now sends the issue to every active subscriber, and it cannot be taken back. Issue Mint asks you to confirm the number first, and it tells you in advance about anything that would stop the send, in the publish panel beside the issue.

The alternative is scheduling it, which runs the same checks against a time you pick.

The confirmation, and what it commits to

Send now opens a confirmation with the recipient count in it: send to this many subscribers now, this cannot be undone, yes or not yet. The count is the number of active subscribers at that moment, and it is the same count the rest of the panel is working from.

Confirming returns almost immediately, and that is not the send finishing. What has happened is that your recipient list has been written down and the work has been queued. What happens when you send is the walkthrough of the rest.

Everything that can block a send

The publish panel lists blockers as sentences rather than greying a button out, so the reason is always on the screen. Four are about readiness:

• No subject. An issue cannot go out without one.
• No links. At least one is needed, which is a low bar for a link roundup.
• Sending cannot go out. On your own Amazon SES or SMTP account this means the credentials need checking on the Sending tab. On our sending it appears only if hosted sending is switched off across the platform, in which case we already know and are dealing with it.
• The trial has ended. Subscribing restores sending immediately, and nothing else about the issue changes in the meantime.

Each one clears as soon as it is fixed, and the panel is rewritten every time the page reloads.

The blockers about the size of your list

The rest come from hosted sending, which is the sending included with your account. None of them apply if you have moved sending to your own Amazon SES or SMTP account, which is free to do at any plan.

A list past 15,000 active subscribers with its grace period spent, a month’s included allowance used up, a trial issue larger than 500 recipients, a trial with less than this issue needs left of its 2,000 emails, or an issue larger than what is left of the rolling daily ceiling, which starts at 1,000 on a new account and doubles every clean week. Every one of those messages names its own number and the size of your list, so it can be acted on rather than guessed at. Sending limits explains where each figure comes from.

What cannot be undone

Nothing recalls a message that has gone. Issue Mint hands messages to a mail provider one at a time, so at any point in a send some of them are already in inboxes, and there is no version of “unsend” that is honest about that.

• The content freezes when the send starts. A draft and a scheduled issue can be edited; an issue that is sending, sent or failed cannot.
• The address on your website is fixed. An issue’s page is addressed by its number, and numbers are assigned when the issue is created and never reused, so editing a subject cannot move a page somebody has bookmarked.
• A sent issue cannot be deleted. It is a page on your website and part of your history, and Issue Mint refuses the request rather than leaving a gap in a sequence readers cite.

If you have no subscribers yet

Pressing send with an empty list is not an error. Issue Mint tells you there was nothing to send, marks the issue sent with no recipients, and publishes it.

That is deliberate rather than a loophole. An issue with nowhere to go should not sit in a sending state for ever, and publishing the page is what somebody writing a first issue before they have a list usually wants: an archive with something in it to point new subscribers at.

A first large send is not a blocker

A first ever send to more than 2,000 recipients does not fail. Pressing send queues it for one of us to look at, and the panel says so before you press it.

It is a one-off, it applies to the first send from an account and no other, and a held first send explains the whole of it, including why an account that has sat dormant for a month is the case it exists for. Below that figure, which covers nearly every newsletter, none of this happens.