The basics of your newsletter

Settings, then General, is where a newsletter gets its name, its web address, a description, a timezone and the number its first issue carries. Sending works from the day you sign up, so none of this is setup standing between you and a first issue.

Publishing frequency sits in the same form and has a page to itself, because a schedule reaches further than the rest of these settings do: what the publishing schedule drives.

The name

The name is what a reader sees, up to 120 characters.

It sets the masthead on the website and archive every newsletter gets when no logo has been uploaded, the heading on every issue, the name on your social cards, and the letter in the browser tab icon. Renaming is safe, takes effect immediately, and touches nothing else.

The one thing a rename does not reach is the name your emails come from. That is copied from the newsletter’s name when the newsletter is created and lives in sender details from then on, so a rename after your first issue wants the from name changed as well.

Your web address

Every newsletter gets {slug}.issuemint.com the moment it is created, with no DNS to set up and nothing to pay for.

That address is also the local part of the address your issues come from: {slug}@news.issuemint.com while Issue Mint sends for you, and {slug}@yourdomain.com once your own domain verifies. Adding a domain moves the website and the sending onto it, and the free address carries on working as a redirect.

The field accepts 3 to 63 characters, using lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, with hyphens between characters rather than at either end. Capitals are lowercased for you. Addresses are unique across the whole platform, and Issue Mint adds a number rather than refusing one that has gone: ask for weekly-dispatch when somebody else has it and you are saved as weekly-dispatch-2, which the field shows you when the page comes back.

The addresses you cannot have

Some names are reserved, because an address one label from issuemint.com reads as ours rather than yours.

Two groups are held back. The first is platform names, real and plausible: www, app, api, mail, admin, docs, blog, news, billing and their neighbours. The second matters more: login, secure, verify, account, password and payments are names a reader would take as Issue Mint speaking to them, which makes customer content on one of them a phishing page we would be hosting ourselves. Typing a reserved name gives you “That address is reserved. Try another.”

A reserved name that arrives by way of your newsletter’s name is numbered rather than refused, so a publication actually called Login is created at login-2.issuemint.com.

The description

The description is a paragraph or two of markdown, up to 2,000 characters, and it is the first thing a reader sees under your masthead.

It does three jobs. It sits on the home page of your website, its first 160 characters become the plain-text description a search result shows, and it is one of the things your social card is built from. Markdown here covers the ordinary things: links, emphasis, bullet lists, tables, and a pasted URL that becomes a link on its own. Raw HTML is escaped rather than rendered, because this text is published on a public page.

The timezone

The timezone decides every date a reader sees and every day boundary in your own figures.

It is the zone the archive stamps an issue with, the day your dashboard and subscriber analytics count as today, the date the composer’s schedule field opens on, and the dates offered on your sponsorship calendar. Setup fills it in from the timezone on your profile, and a newsletter that has never had one set is UTC. Changing it moves the boundary from that point on: days already recorded keep the dates they were recorded under, which is why this is worth getting right before you care about the numbers.

The first issue number

The first issue number decides anything only while the newsletter has no issues at all. It accepts 1 to 1,000,000.

It exists for one situation, and it is a good one: you are moving from another platform and left off at issue 247. Put 248 here before you write anything and your readers see one continuous run rather than a publication that started again at the beginning.

Once any issue exists, a draft included, the field is switched off and tells you the number the next issue will actually get. Issue Mint disables it rather than accepting a number it would then ignore.

The weekly summary email

The weekly summary is a Monday morning email about one newsletter: how the list moved, how last week’s issues landed, and anything waiting on you.

The toggle sits at the bottom of the same form, so a second newsletter can have it on while a first has it off. Every other message Issue Mint might send you is listed on the emails we send.