Double opt-in

Double opt-in means a new signup confirms by email before they are on your list. Issue Mint has it switched on for every new newsletter, and the switch is in Settings, then Subscribers. It is the standard practice for good reason: a list where everybody has clicked a link in an inbox they really own bounces less, complains less and arrives more often.

What the reader sees

Two steps, a few seconds apart, and both of them name your newsletter rather than Issue Mint.

The form tells them they are almost there and to check their inbox. The email arrives carrying your newsletter’s name as the sender and your own address as the reply-to, so a reply reaches you and not us. Clicking the link lands them on a page that says they are in, names the newsletter, and offers a link to your past issues, which is the one moment in the whole flow where somebody is guaranteed to be paying attention and an archive worth reading is sitting right there.

Until they click, their status is pending. Nothing is ever sent to a pending subscriber apart from the confirmation itself, they are not in your active count, and they do not count towards a plan limit.

What the confirmation email says

It says what they signed up to, carries one link, and tells them the link is good for seven days.

It also tells them that ignoring it means nothing will be sent, which is the sentence that keeps a stranger who mistyped their address out of your complaint statistics. The email goes out through Issue Mint’s own mail rather than your sending account, on purpose: a reader can be confirming on the day you launch, long before you have looked at how your issues are sent, and a confirmation that waited for your setup would be a confirmation that never arrived.

The one reminder, three days on

A reader who never confirmed gets exactly one nudge, 3 days after they signed up. The run goes out mid-morning, so it arrives in a reader’s inbox at a sensible hour rather than at dawn.

Double opt-in loses a slice of every list to distraction rather than to doubt: the email arrives while somebody is doing something else, and is never opened again. One reminder recovers a good part of that, and at three days the original link is still live, so a reader who kept the first email is not being sent back to a dead one. The subject line is different from the first email, because a second identical subject in an inbox reads as a duplicate send, which is how a complaint happens.

Three rules keep it from becoming anything more.

• Once, ever. The reminder says out loud that it is the only one, and the record of having sent it means it cannot go twice.
• A window, not a backlog. Only signups from the last 14 days qualify. Without that, turning this on would have mailed every stale pending row on the platform at once, which from a mailbox provider’s side of the wire is indistinguishable from somebody importing a bought list.
• The same gates as a fresh signup. A suppressed address is never contacted, and an account whose trial has ended sends nothing.

Why imports skip it

Imported readers arrive active, and are not asked to confirm.

The substitute is asked for at the point of import instead: a tick saying these people gave you permission, and a note saying where the list came from. That is the deal an import makes, and it is a deliberate trade rather than a shortcut. Re-confirming a list of five thousand people who signed up to your newsletter years ago means a bulk send to an audience expecting nothing, from a sending address with no history, on a file where a share of the addresses have since died. The bounces and complaints from that campaign land on you, and the people who never open it, most of whom are perfectly real, are silently lost.

Adding one person by hand is the other way round. The add-by-hand dialog honours the setting and tells you which of the two will happen, because one address typed into a box has neither a permission tick nor a source note behind it.

Turning it off, and what changes

The switch is per newsletter, and turning it off applies to signups from that moment rather than retrospectively.

With it off, a signup is active immediately and receives your next issue. Anybody already sitting at pending stays pending, because they have not agreed to anything yet and flipping a setting is not their consent. The honest case for switching it off is a form behind a wall you already control, where the person has proven who they are some other way. Anywhere a stranger can type an address, leave it on: the address somebody else types into your form is the one that reports you as spam.