The pages your newsletter gets

Every newsletter gets a home page, a full archive, a page for each issue it has sent, and the handful of files search engines and feed readers go looking for. The whole set is live on your {slug}.issuemint.com address from the moment the newsletter exists, before you have sent anything and before you have touched DNS. Adding your own domain moves the same pages onto it, and changes nothing else about them.

The home page

The home page carries your name, your description, when you publish, a subscribe form and your five most recent issues.

Your description is the Description box in Settings, then General, and it is markdown, so a link or a line of bold text in it works. The line underneath it is generated from your schedule settings and reads “Published every Thursday” or “Published every other Tuesday”. Before your first issue goes out, the issue list says so plainly and points at the subscribe form, so the page is usable on day one rather than apologetic.

The archive

The archive lives at /issues and lists every issue you have sent, newest first, 25 to a page with Newer and Older links at the bottom.

Dates on the archive are formatted in your newsletter’s own timezone rather than ours, which matters more than it sounds: an issue that goes out at 20:00 in New York would otherwise be stamped with tomorrow’s date on your own website. The archive is also the page most worth linking to from elsewhere, because it is the one that keeps growing. There is more on what the archive website is for on the features side.

A page for every issue

Every sent issue gets its own page at /issues/12, and that page is the web version of the email. It is where the “View in browser” link in each send points.

The page carries the issue number and date, the subject as its heading, your intro, then the links grouped under your section headings with your commentary under each one. Sponsored items keep their label and their tint. Links on the page run through the same tracking codes the email used, so a click from the archive counts on the same row as a click from an inbox, which is covered in how click tracking works. An issue you have not sent returns 404 rather than merely being unlinked, because a draft is often embargoed.

The submission page and the sponsor page

The sponsor page at /sponsor always exists. The submission page at /submit exists only when you have switched submissions on.

Turn on “Accept link submissions” in Settings, then Website, and /submit starts answering and a “Submit a link” link appears in the footer. Leave it off and the address returns 404. Suggestions land in your library, and you hear about them in one digest a day rather than one email per link, which reader submissions goes into. The sponsor page shows what you sell in either enquiry or calendar mode, and it can show your subscriber count if you want sponsors to see it.

The feed, the sitemap and the favicon

Four addresses on every newsletter site are there for software rather than for people: /feed.xml, /sitemap.xml, /robots.txt and /favicon.svg.

The feed carries your recent issues for anybody reading in a feed reader. The sitemap lists your home page, your archive and every issue with the date it went out. The robots file points crawlers at that sitemap. The favicon is generated rather than uploaded: it is your newsletter’s initial on your brand colour, because a wordmark logo is unreadable at the size a browser tab gives it.

There is no about page

Issue Mint does not publish an about page, a contact page or a blog for your newsletter, and there is no way to add one.

The description on your home page is where that writing goes, and it is worth more attention than most people give it, because the same text becomes your meta description and the headline on your social card. If you want a full about page, put it on a site you already run and link to it from the description.

Nothing on the page runs JavaScript

A newsletter site loads no JavaScript at all. The pages are HTML built on our server, styled by a block of CSS inside the page itself and your two typefaces, and the security policy they are served with forbids scripts outright rather than merely happening not to include any.

That decision is why the pages are quick on a phone, and it also means no third-party analytics, no advertising tags, no chat widget and no code you can inject. The public forms are protected by hidden fields bots fill in and humans never see, plus a rate limit of five submissions a minute and fifty a day from one address, rather than by a puzzle in front of your reader.

When a reader follows a dead link

A page that does not exist on your site returns a 404 in your brand, not ours, using your logo, colour and typeface.

A dead link to an issue number that was never sent, or a URL a reader mistyped, lands on a page that still looks like your newsletter and still offers the way back to your archive.