Sending works the moment you sign up

We send it for you

Your issues go out through our sending setup, which is already warmed up, already trusted by the big mail providers, and already looked after by us. You do not have to think about any of it. Most people never read past this paragraph, and that is the correct amount of attention to give it.

By default your issues come from an address on our own sending domain, with replies going to yours, so anybody who hits reply reaches you rather than us. Add your own domain and your issues come from your name instead, which is worth doing before you have many readers. It is the same two records you add for your archive website, and we check them for you.

When you would rather own it yourself

Once a newsletter is a business rather than a habit, some people want the sending in their own hands. The reputation you build with Gmail and Outlook is worth real money, and on a shared setup, ours included, it is not strictly yours. If you want it to be, connect your own account in settings and everything after that goes out under your name alone.

It costs nothing extra. It is the same price on every plan, and it is a switch you flick when you want to, not a hoop we make you jump through first. You can switch back just as easily, and neither direction touches your list, your archive or anything you have already sent.

The setup is about ten minutes: create an account with Amazon or the email service you already pay for, copy a few details across, and paste three records where your domain lives. We show you exactly what goes where and check it afterwards. If you would rather not do it alone, email us and we will go through it with you.

Amazon SES, or an email service you already have

Amazon runs a plain sending service called SES. It is not a newsletter tool and you will never really use it directly, it just carries mail, and it is far and away the cheapest option. It charges a fraction of a cent per email, so even a large list costs a few dollars a month. We handle the fiddly parts: registering your domain, fetching the records that prove the mail is really from you, and watching for the restricted mode that new Amazon accounts start in and that catches almost everybody out the first time.

Most ordinary sending services work too, including Mailgun, Postmark, SendGrid and Brevo. You copy four fields from their settings page and you are done. One genuine drawback worth knowing: when an address goes bad some time after the message was accepted, that route gives us no way to hear about it, so those addresses are not cleaned off your list automatically the way they are with Amazon. If you have a free choice, take the Amazon route.

Above fifteen thousand readers

We send on your behalf up to fifteen thousand readers. Past that, you move to your own sending account, and this is the one place where the choice stops being entirely yours.

The reason is honest enough. Sending on somebody else's behalf at that scale means our reputation carries your list, and at that size your list deserves to carry itself. We start telling you at twelve thousand, so it arrives as something to plan rather than something to panic about, and we do not cut you off the moment you cross the line.

It costs no more. The plan price is the same either way, and the sending you set up belongs to you from then on, including the day you decide to go somewhere else entirely.

Landing in the inbox is a shared job

Our half is the plumbing, in both directions. Correct headers so unsubscribing works properly in every mail app, a plain text version alongside the pretty one because some readers and most spam filters want it, addresses that bounce or complain dropped automatically so you never mail them twice, and sending paced sensibly rather than fired off all at once.

Your half is smaller and it is the half that decides everything. Only mail people who asked you to. No amount of correct setup makes a bought list acceptable, and buying one is the fastest way to ruin a name you will want for years. It is also the one thing that will get your sending stopped here, whoever is doing the sending.