Curated newsletter
A curated newsletter is an email issue built from links its author found elsewhere, grouped under headings, each carrying a sentence or two of the author's own commentary. The value is the selection and the opinion attached to it rather than original long-form writing.
Also called a link roundup or a link digest. The format spans every subject there is: design weeklies, local listings, trade digests, charity supporter updates. What they share is a reader who trusts one person's judgement enough to outsource an hour of reading to them.
How an issue is put together
Issue
An issue is a single edition of a newsletter, sent once to the subscriber list and usually numbered in sequence. In a curated newsletter an issue is a set of named sections with links inside them.
Link library
A link library is a running store of saved links waiting to be used in a future issue. It exists because the hard part of a curated newsletter is collecting through the week rather than writing on send day.
The composer and the library
Rate card
A rate card is a published list of what each advertising placement costs. For a newsletter it usually names the slot types, their prices, the audience size and the lead time needed to book.
Publishing one saves the two emails every enquiry otherwise starts with, and it stops you pricing the same slot differently depending on how the day is going.
Double opt-in
Double opt-in is a signup process that sends a confirmation email and only adds the address to the list once the recipient clicks the link in it. It proves the person actually owns the address and actually wanted the newsletter.
It costs you some signups, mostly the mistyped and the insincere ones, and it buys a list that bounces less and complains less. On a shared sending platform it is close to mandatory.
Sender reputation
Sender reputation is the judgement that mail providers such as Gmail and Outlook form about a sending domain and IP address, based on how recipients have reacted to their mail over time. It is the main thing deciding whether an issue reaches the inbox or the spam folder.
It is built slowly and lost quickly. Consistent volume, low complaints and engaged readers build it; one mailing to a purchased list can undo months of it.
How sending works
Deliverability
Deliverability is the share of sent email that arrives in recipients' inboxes rather than being rejected outright or filed as spam. It is distinct from delivery, which only means the receiving server accepted the message.
A message can be delivered and still never be seen. That gap is why deliverability is measured by engagement rather than by the sending platform's own success counts.
Bounce
A bounce is an email the receiving server refused. A hard bounce is permanent, meaning the address does not exist, and the address should never be mailed again. A soft bounce is temporary, such as a full mailbox, and is worth retrying.
Amazon SES treats a bounce rate above 5% as grounds for review of the sending account, so hard bounces should be suppressed automatically rather than left on the list.
Complaint rate
Complaint rate is the proportion of delivered emails that recipients mark as spam. It is the single most damaging metric in email sending, because mail providers treat it as a direct signal that the sender is unwanted.
Amazon SES treats a complaint rate above 0.1% as grounds for review, which is one complaint in a thousand delivered emails. That is a much smaller number than most first-time publishers expect, and it is why making unsubscribing easy is in your own interest.
Suppression list
A suppression list is the record of addresses that must never be emailed again, typically those that hard bounced, complained or unsubscribed. It is checked before every send.
The important property is that importing a list cannot resurrect a suppressed address. If it could, one careless re-import would undo every unsubscribe you have honoured.
One-click unsubscribe
One-click unsubscribe is an unsubscribe link presented by the mail client itself, at the top of the message, which removes the recipient without them visiting a web page. It is defined by RFC 8058 and required by Gmail and Yahoo for bulk senders.
Making it easy to leave sounds like it costs you subscribers. It costs you far less than the alternative, which is that somebody who cannot find the unsubscribe link marks you as spam instead.
Open rate
Open rate is the share of delivered emails recorded as opened, measured by a tracking pixel loading. It has become an unreliable measure because Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads that pixel for many recipients whether or not anybody read the message.
Treat it as a rough trend line and nothing more. For a curated newsletter the honest signal is clicks, because a click means somebody wanted the thing you recommended.
Link tracking and reports
Click-through rate
Click-through rate is the share of recipients who clicked at least one link in an issue. For a curated newsletter it is the closest available measure of whether the selection was any good.
Worth measuring per link as well as per issue. The issue-level number tells you how you did; the per-link ranking tells you what to pick more of next week.
Archive
A newsletter archive is a public website carrying every past issue as its own page. It is what makes a newsletter findable by people who have never received one.
Email is invisible to search engines and to anybody who has not already subscribed. The archive is the part of a newsletter that keeps working months after the issue was sent.
Your public archive
Bring your own sending
Bring your own sending is an arrangement where a newsletter platform sends issues through the publisher's own email sending account, such as Amazon SES, rather than its own. The publisher then owns the sender reputation and pays for delivery at cost.
It is unusual: almost every newsletter platform sends from shared infrastructure and keeps that arrangement. The trade is a little setup in exchange for an asset that comes with you if you leave.
How sending works
Active subscriber
An active subscriber is a confirmed address currently receiving a newsletter. Addresses that never confirmed, unsubscribed, hard bounced or complained are not active, which matters because platforms usually price on this number rather than on total signups.
It is the figure worth checking on any pricing page, because two platforms quoting the same price can mean quite different things by it. A list of ten thousand signups might be seven thousand active.
How a plan is worked out
Send allowance
A send allowance is a ceiling on how many emails an account may send in a period, separate from how many subscribers it has. It exists because a platform that includes delivery pays per message, so an unbounded promise is not one it can keep.
An allowance and a subscriber limit catch different things. A thousand subscribers mailed daily costs more to deliver than ten thousand mailed monthly, and only an allowance notices.
The limits on hosted sending
Warm-up
Warm-up is the practice of raising a new sender's daily volume gradually rather than starting at full size. Mailbox providers read a brand-new address suddenly mailing tens of thousands of people as the signature of a bought list, whether or not it is one.
The limits on hosted sending
Undeliverable domain
An undeliverable domain is the part of an email address after the at sign that has no mail server and no address records at all, so nothing sent to it can arrive. Every address on such a domain is a guaranteed hard bounce.
Usually a typo, and usually a common one: a missing letter in a large provider's name accounts for most of them. Catching these before a send is worth more than it sounds, because hard bounces are one of the two rates a mailbox provider judges a sender on.
Addresses that cannot receive mail
Refused address
A refused address is one a platform declined to add to a list, most often because its domain cannot receive mail. Keeping a record of them is what lets somebody answer the question that arrives days later, when a file of six hundred rows added five hundred and ninety.
Where refused addresses go
Import review
An import review is a hold placed on a large or unusual subscriber import so a person checks it before any address becomes mailable. It is the control standing between one bought list and the sending reputation every other publisher on a shared platform depends on.
The addresses are not rejected while they wait. They sit on the list in a state that receives nothing, so releasing the review costs a click and refusing it costs the publisher nothing they had.
Why an import waits
Canonical host
A canonical host is the single address a website officially lives at, where more than one would work. Choosing one and redirecting the rest to it is what stops search engines treating example.com and www.example.com as two sites competing with each other.
Choosing between the bare domain and www
CNAME flattening
CNAME flattening is a DNS provider following a CNAME record itself and answering with the addresses it finds, rather than passing the CNAME on. It exists because the DNS standard does not allow a CNAME at the root of a domain, and flattening is how modern providers offer one anyway.
It is the reason the same instruction works at one registrar and not another. Where a provider cannot do it, pointing the root of a domain at a hosted service is not available at all, and using a subdomain is the answer rather than a workaround.
When the bare domain cannot be pointed
Certificate validation record
A certificate validation record is a DNS record proving to a certificate authority that whoever asked for an HTTPS certificate controls the domain. Delegating it once, rather than adding a fresh record at every renewal, is what keeps a site from going dark ninety days later.
How certificates are issued and renewed
Tracking domain
A tracking domain is the hostname that click-tracking links in an email point at before redirecting to their destination. Running it on the publisher's own domain rather than the platform's means a reader hovering a link sees a name they recognise.
It reads better, and it helps deliverability, because a link pointing at a domain shared by thousands of senders inherits whatever the worst of them has been doing.
How click tracking works
Scanner traffic
Scanner traffic is clicks and opens recorded by security software rather than by people. Corporate mail filters and link checkers visit every link in a message before a recipient sees it, which registers as engagement that never happened.
It is why two tools report different numbers for the same send, and why a click rate that looks implausibly good on a list of corporate addresses usually is. Filtering it out lowers the figures and improves them.
Why the robots are excluded
Mail Privacy Protection
Mail Privacy Protection is an Apple feature that loads the tracking pixel in every message on the reader's behalf, whether or not they opened it. Open rates for any list with a significant share of Apple Mail readers are inflated as a result, and cannot be corrected for.
It is the reason open rate stopped being a measurement and became a trend line. A click still means somebody chose to act, which is why clicks are the number worth planning around.
What open tracking can and cannot tell you
Reader submission
A reader submission is a link sent in by somebody who reads the newsletter, through a form on its website. It arrives as a suggestion for the curator to consider rather than as anything published automatically.
For an established newsletter it becomes a meaningful share of the good material, and it costs the curator nothing but the reading.
Taking submissions from readers
