Who your issues come from

Applies however you send.

Three things decide what a reader sees when your issue arrives: the from name, the from address, and the reply-to address behind it. Issue Mint fills all three in when a newsletter is created, so a first issue looks right without anybody touching them.

What you can change depends on who is doing the sending, and that is the part worth being precise about.

The from name

The from name is your newsletter’s name, and it is the largest thing a reader sees in a crowded inbox.

Issue Mint sets it from the newsletter’s name at the point the newsletter is created. On your own Amazon SES or SMTP account it is a field on the Sending tab, so you can send as a person, as a publication, or as both together in the form most publishers settle on, which is a name and a title. Punctuation is safe in it, including quotes and angle brackets.

The from address

While Issue Mint does the sending, the from address is {slug}@news.issuemint.com, or {slug}@yourdomain.com once you have added a domain and its records have verified.

Neither is editable, and there is nothing lost by that: the address is a valid sending identity, it is signed, and it is on your own domain as soon as you have one. On your own provider the address is yours to set, subject to the same-domain rule. Sending from your own domain covers how an address on your own domain arrives.

The from address has to be on your connected domain

With a domain connected to your newsletter, Issue Mint requires the from address to be on it, or on a subdomain of it. An address on any other domain is refused when you save, naming the domain it expects.

This is not tidiness. Your domain is the one carrying the DKIM records, so it is the domain whose signature travels with the message. A mailbox receiving mail signed by example.com but addressed from you@gmail.com sees a signature that does not match the sender, which is precisely the mismatch DMARC exists to catch. Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft all publish policies that tell other mailboxes to reject mail claiming to be from their addresses and sent from somewhere else, so it is not a subtle failure or an occasional one.

Where replies go

Replies go to the address you signed up with.

While Issue Mint does the sending, that header matters more than it looks, because the hosted from address is a sending identity that cannot receive mail. Without a reply-to, every reply a reader wrote would go nowhere at all. So Issue Mint sets one to your own address when the newsletter is created, and the Sending tab shows you which address it is currently using.

On your own provider the reply-to field is yours and it is optional. Leaving it empty is honoured rather than corrected, because replies then land on your from address, which is yours and can receive mail. Filling it in is what you want when the from address is a publishing address and the replies should reach a person, or an inbox somebody watches.

The postal address in your footer

Issue Mint puts a postal address in your email footer and on your website footer, if you give it one. The field is in Settings, under Website.

It is optional in the product and expected by law in most places: anti-spam rules on both sides of the Atlantic want a physical address in commercial email, and a PO box or a registered office satisfies that as well as a street address. It sits alongside the unsubscribe link in the same footer block, which is covered in unsubscribes and footers.

What you cannot change while Issue Mint sends

While sending is ours, all three are fixed: the from name, the from address and the reply-to.

They are set when the newsletter is created, and the fields for them on the Sending tab belong to a provider you have connected rather than to hosted sending. Two consequences worth knowing. Renaming a newsletter changes its name on the website, in the dashboard and on the website your newsletter gets, but not the name on the envelope of the next issue. And the one sender detail you can change without connecting a provider is the address itself, by adding your own domain, which is also the change a reader is most likely to notice.