How your issues go out

Applies however you send.

Issue Mint sends your issues, from the moment you sign up. There is no provider to connect, no keys to paste and no DNS records to add before a first issue can go out, and publishing is available on a newsletter the day it is created.

Sending can be arranged four ways, and they are a progression rather than a menu. Issue Mint sends from its own address, then from your domain once you add one, then through your own Amazon SES or SMTP account if you decide the sending itself should be yours. Nothing asks you to pick one of the four up front. Each step happens as a consequence of something you did for another reason, which is adding a domain for your website, or saving credentials for a provider you want to use.

The address a new newsletter sends from

Issues from a new newsletter come from {slug}@news.issuemint.com, where the slug is the same short name your website uses.

The from name is your newsletter’s name, so what a reader sees in their inbox is your title rather than ours. That news.issuemint.com host is kept separate from the one our own account emails come from, deliberately: a delivery problem on one cannot drag the other down with it.

Where a reader’s reply goes

Replies go to the email address you signed up with.

The hosted from address is a sending identity and cannot receive mail, so without a reply-to header every reply a reader wrote would go nowhere. Issue Mint sets that header to your own address when the newsletter is created. Which address that is, and what changes about it once you connect a provider of your own, is covered in from name, from address and reply-to.

Sent by Issue Mint

Every newsletter starts on Issue Mint’s own sending account. We pay for delivery, and the sender reputation that builds up is ours rather than yours.

Because that reputation is shared between everybody sending this way, hosted sending carries fair-use boundaries: an allowance, a subscriber cap, a warm-up ramp on a new account, and a pause if a list turns out to be in worse shape than it looked. Those are set out in full on the limits on hosted sending, and most newsletters never meet one.

Sent by Issue Mint, from your own domain

Adding your own domain moves the from address onto it, so issues arrive from {slug}@yourdomain.com and are signed by your domain rather than ours. Issue Mint still does the sending.

This happens as a side effect of adding a domain for your website, which is one visit to your DNS provider rather than a second project. The mechanics are in sending from your own domain, and the hosted limits still apply throughout, because the delivery is still ours.

Your own Amazon SES

Connecting your own Amazon SES account moves the sending itself, and with it the reputation, the delivery bill and the ceilings.

Issue Mint runs the setup against your AWS account for you, creates the pieces that let bounces and complaints come back, and then waits for a real test message to get through before it will publish anything. See using your own Amazon SES account.

Your own SMTP server

Any SMTP server works, and it is the arrangement to reach for when you already have a provider you want to keep.

The trade is real and worth reading before you choose it: an SMTP server tells Issue Mint nothing once a message has left, so bounces and spam complaints cannot clean your list on their own. That is set out in using your own SMTP server.

How fast an issue goes out

Hosted sending runs at 12 a second, in batches of 200 recipients, which puts a list of ten thousand through in around a quarter of an hour.

On your own Amazon SES account, Issue Mint reads the rate AWS allows you and stays under it, so a generous quota sends faster and a new one sends slower. An SMTP server cannot be asked what it will tolerate, so sending runs at a deliberately cautious 10 a second.

What none of this asks of you

Nothing on this page is a decision you have to make before writing. A newsletter that never touches its sending settings sends perfectly well for as long as it wants to, and the reasons to move are covered in choosing how you send rather than assumed here. The product side of the same story is what sending gives you.