Adding somebody by hand

Add subscriber sits at the top of the subscriber list, and it takes an email address and an optional first name. It is the right tool for one person who asked you in a reply or at an event, and the wrong tool for a list, which belongs in a CSV import.

What the dialog asks for

Two fields: the email address, which is required, and a first name, which is not.

The first name is the same field a reader fills in on your own signup form, so it appears beside the address in the list and can be used in an issue in the same way. Nothing else is collected. There are no tags, no custom fields and no notes against a subscriber in Issue Mint, so if you keep that kind of detail it lives in your own records rather than here.

Whether they get a confirmation email

The dialog honours the newsletter’s double opt-in setting rather than going round it, and it tells you which of the two will happen before you press the button.

With double opt-in on, which is the default, the person is added as pending and gets the same confirmation email a website signup would. They turn active when they click it, and nothing is sent to them until they do. With it off, they are added as active and can receive your next issue.

That is a deliberate difference from an import. An import asks you to tick a permission box and write down where the list came from, and then lands people as active on the strength of it. One address typed into a box has neither, so it goes the way any other signup would.

The domain check on the address

Before the address is accepted, Issue Mint checks that the part after the at sign can receive email at all.

The check looks for a mail server, or failing that an address record, on the domain. A domain with none of those cannot take delivery, so every address on it is a guaranteed bounce. When that is what it finds, the dialog stays open with what you typed still in it and says it cannot find a mail server for that address, asking whether the part after the at sign is spelled right. That wording is chosen because the answer is almost always yes, it is a typo, and you are still looking at the field.

The check answers a question about the domain and never about the mailbox. An address at a domain that exists will be accepted whether or not anybody is behind it, because the only way to test a mailbox is to knock on the mail server’s door, and what that check does and does not do covers why Issue Mint will not do that.

The four ways an address is refused

Four answers other than success are possible, and each one keeps the dialog open with the address in place so you can see which you got.

• The domain cannot receive email. The check above.
• Already on your list. The address is there in some state already. Search for it in the list to see which.
• Cannot be mailed. The address has previously hard bounced or reported a newsletter as spam. Issue Mint will not add it, and adding it again will not change that. The suppression list is consulted on the way in for exactly this reason.
• The list is closed. The account’s trial has ended without a subscription, so no list on it is taking new subscribers until that is sorted out.

The suppression answer stops short of naming which newsletter the complaint was about. A hard bounce recorded by another publisher suppresses an address everywhere, because a dead mailbox is dead for everyone, and whose issue it was is not part of the answer.

What is recorded when it is refused

An address refused for its domain is written down, and this is the one place in the product where that is true of a single typed address.

The reasoning is about who is going to ask. You may well come back in a week wondering what happened to an address you were sure you added, and by then the message in the dialog is long gone, so the refused addresses panel on the subscriber list keeps it. A stranger mistyping their own address on your public signup form is told in the field and fixes it on the spot, so there is no later question, and recording every bad address a form receives would mean collecting people who never asked anything of us.

When to use an import instead

Anything more than a few addresses is faster and better documented as a file.

An import maps columns, skips duplicates and anybody already on the list, checks every domain in one pass, and leaves a record of the file and the source note you wrote. Both routes end in the same place: a subscriber who can be sent your next issue, on sending that is included from signup with nothing to configure first.