Deleting a newsletter

Deleting a newsletter is immediate and permanent. The website goes offline, and the subscribers, the issues, the archive, the library, the sponsorship inventory and every figure ever recorded go with it.

There is no undo, no recycle bin and no export afterwards, so anything you want to keep has to leave first. Deleting a newsletter does not close your Issue Mint account, and deleting your account is a separate thing that takes every newsletter on it.

What Issue Mint asks before it deletes

The delete lives in Settings, then Danger zone, and it asks you to type your newsletter’s web address exactly.

The address rather than the name, because the address is short, unambiguous and sitting in front of you, and because typing it is a moment’s thought about which newsletter you are on. The button stays disabled until what you have typed matches, and the server checks it again on the way in, so a stray click cannot get past it. There is no email confirmation and no waiting period: when the page returns, it is done.

What deletion takes with it

Deleting a newsletter removes everything belonging to it, in one go.

• Your list. Every subscriber, of every status, including unsubscribed and suppressed addresses and the record of anything you imported.
• Every issue. Drafts, scheduled issues and everything you have sent.
• The public site. The website, the archive, the RSS feed and the sponsor page stop answering, on the issuemint.com address and on your own domain alike.
• The working parts. The link library, your sections, your sponsorship slot types, booked slots and enquiries.
• The numbers. Opens, clicks, daily figures and every issue report.
• The files. Your logo, sponsors’ artwork, generated social cards and any import CSV still held on our side.

Links in issues already delivered stop working

The tracked links inside issues you have already sent are deleted along with everything else, and a deleted tracking link resolves to nothing.

That is worth sitting with for a moment, because those emails are in other people’s inboxes and cannot be edited. A reader who opens last week’s issue after you have deleted the newsletter finds links that no longer go anywhere, and the “view this on the web” link at the top lands on a page that is gone. How click tracking works explains why the redirect is what makes those links work in the first place.

What is released behind the scenes

A newsletter with a custom domain holds things in two other companies’ systems, and deletion hands them back.

The Amazon identity your sending was authorised against is released, and a newsletter that was sending from its own domain is walked back to hosted sending first so nothing tries to send from an identity that has gone. The Cloudflare hostnames that served your site over HTTPS, up to three of them, are released at the same time. Uploaded files are removed from storage. If Amazon or Cloudflare is having a bad day, the failure is logged and the deletion still completes, on the grounds that a delete button which errors is worse than an orphan we can clean up later.

Two things are not released. Your DNS records stay exactly where they are, at your registrar, pointing at a newsletter that no longer exists, and removing a domain is the tidier route if the domain is the only thing you wanted back. And your web address returns to the pool the moment the newsletter goes, so somebody else can take it.

What to take out first

Two exports are worth doing before you delete anything, and both take seconds.

Export your subscribers as a CSV from your subscriber list, which is the only copy of that list you will have afterwards. Then export the link figures from any issue you care about, on the issue report. If the writing matters to you, save the pages of your archive as well: they are ordinary web pages until the moment they are not.

What deleting a newsletter does not do

Deleting a newsletter is not a way to stop paying and not a way to leave.

It does not cancel your subscription or close your account, so if you are finishing with Issue Mint entirely, cancelling is the page you want. It does not notify your subscribers or your sponsors, who hear nothing at all. And it does not change your plan on the spot: the plan is sized on active subscribers across the account, so removing a list makes the account smaller and the ordinary review moves the plan down after that.

If you are not sure

There is no archive button, and there does not need to be one.

Issue Mint charges by the size of your list rather than by the number of newsletters you keep, so a newsletter you have stopped sending costs you only what its subscribers add to your plan. Leaving it alone keeps the archive online, keeps the links in old issues working and keeps the option of a return, and the delete will still be there in six months if you decide you meant it.