Your subscriber list

The subscriber list is one page per newsletter, at Subscribers in the sidebar. It shows 50 people at a time, newest first, with search and three filters above the table and the count of active subscribers in the heading. Everything on this page works from the day you sign up, with an empty list and nothing configured.

The six statuses

Every subscriber holds exactly one of six statuses, and only one of them can be sent an issue.

• Active. Confirmed and receiving issues. The only mailable status, and the only one that counts towards a plan limit.
• Pending. Signed up, not yet confirmed. Applies when double opt-in is on for the newsletter. Nothing is ever sent to a pending subscriber apart from the confirmation itself.
• Waiting for review. Arrived in an import that is waiting for a check from us. The address holds a place on your list without being mailable.
• Unsubscribed. Left, by their own choice or because you unsubscribed them.
• Bounced. Mail to the address failed permanently.
• Complained. Reported an issue as spam. Permanently suppressed, and never revived by a new signup or a later import.

Bounced and complained are the two Issue Mint refuses to undo. A signup form, an import and the add-by-hand dialog all consult the suppression list before writing anything, so an address in either state cannot be brought back by adding it again.

Where a subscriber came from

The source column records how somebody arrived, and it is set once, when the row is created. There are five values.

• Embedded form, from the snippet on a site you run elsewhere.
• Newsletter website, from the signup form on your own Issue Mint site.
• Imported, from a CSV.
• Added manually, from the add-by-hand dialog.
• Extension test, which exists in the product but nothing writes yet. A test send from the browser extension does not create a subscriber, so no real list has one of these rows.

Source is worth filtering on when a number moves and you want to know which door it came through. It is also in the export, so a spreadsheet can answer the same question over a longer period.

Searching and filtering

Search matches the email address and the first name, and it is not case sensitive. Typing waits for a pause rather than firing on every keystroke.

Three filters sit beside it. Status lists all six with a count against each, so you can see how many bounced rows you are carrying without filtering to find out. Source lists the five above. The third filter is engagement, described below. The filters combine, and the table tells you when a combination matches nobody rather than looking empty for no reason.

Sorting is available on the email address, the status and the signup date, and a sort holds while you page through. Ties are broken on the row itself, so paging through a list where thousands of people share a signup timestamp, which is exactly what a CSV import produces, cannot show the same person twice or skip anybody.

Filtering by who has been reading

The engagement filter divides your list by behaviour over the last 5 sent issues, and it offers three groups.

• Opened or clicked means sent at least one of those issues and opened or clicked at least one of them.
• Received, did neither means sent at least one and neither opened nor clicked any.
• Not sent to yet means none of those issues went to them, which is where a reader who joined last week sits.

The middle group is deliberately not everybody who is not engaged. Somebody who signed up yesterday has received nothing, and putting them on a re-engagement list would be a mistake the definition can avoid. A click counts even when an open does not, because click tracking needs no image to load and a reader with images blocked who clicks a link is plainly reading. The same definition drives the counts on the subscriber analytics page, so a segment that reads 340 there exports 340 rows here.

Selecting people and acting on them

Two bulk actions are available once you select somebody: unsubscribe, and delete.

The header checkbox selects everybody on the page you are looking at, not everybody your filters match. Unsubscribing sets the status and the date in one go and is not attributed to any issue, which is the difference between doing it here and a reader unsubscribing themselves. Deleting asks you to confirm, and it is permanent.

Exporting the list

Export gives you a CSV of every row your filters currently match, not the page on screen.

The file carries the email address, the first name, the status, the source, the signup date and the confirmation date, and it is named for your newsletter and the day you took it. It is streamed rather than assembled in memory, so a list of any size downloads without waiting. Filtering to unsubscribed and exporting is the quickest way to hand a list of departures to somebody, and filtering to active before you export is worth doing if the file is destined for anywhere that will mail it.

Addresses that never reached the list

A panel above the table appears when Issue Mint has refused an address because its domain has no way to receive email at all.

Those addresses are not subscribers and are not in any count on this page. They are kept separately so a question weeks later still has an answer, and the refused addresses panel explains what is recorded and for how long.