Buttondown's stance on if you get to keep your username or not

Twitter recently updated their <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/inactive-twitter-accounts">inactive account policy</a>, paving the way for their ability to &#39;reclaim&#39; abandoned accounts that have been deemed inactive.
I&#39;d like to take this opportunity to re-affirm Buttondown&#39;s policy on this subject:
<ol>
<li>We will hold onto your username and archives indefinitely, regardless of whether or not you&#39;re a paying customer. We understand that newsletters are often hobbies or projects with long-term horizons, and stepping away for months or years is not just normal but healthy.</li>
<li>If you delete your newsletter, there is no grace period — that username can be immediately recycled by another user.</li>
</ol>
(As always, these policies can be superceded by healthy judgment in cases of terms of use violations: if you&#39;re egregiously camping usernames or engaged in malicious activity on the platform, they may not apply. )
Here&#39;s the thing: digital life is hard enough. You should not have to spend any time worrying about someone stealing your digital identity, nor any time worrying about a URL you visited in 2023 having vanished in 2025.
Buttondown is, more than anything, committed to making your life a tiny bit easier in a number of ways. We hope this policy is one of those infintesimal ways.

Buttondown's username retention policy

If you log on to Buttondown today (or, I suppose, any date in the foreseeable future), you&#39;ll notice that the sidebar is a little smaller. Gone are the three separate links to drafts, scheduled emails, and archive — in its stead is a combined link, emails, that has, well, all three of those things.
<img src="https://media.cleanshot.cloud/media/41231/UegWNTdIHbgy2BGC16MmO9kioNGxPXVKD7BwEqt9.jpeg?Expires=1663812240&Signature=qLK81OGotP9BU7CYMv0vbjiZu-kk1~YgoIciF3FXQqsWMxOmops2Skk~y6rleejqbqGIE9Qpxp2lvZpwFb2XC2wyVqPGECMHRKJZnxX0bBnxVVokX48A3qGzXHz36LHz3LM8KAfPTpMb-7vro6DqxGVqtYSMXHJN089f7bf~w8r38ZILgMZPtBtsLAzlEuDX31NW-fmy0z3wKhW~7kOs-wQhhMACY8Vjp4QHpdP~F6azjmyUWsCQdRtONJjJFWdL3EbJxZIfvnGu5Ua2S0J5NUYb0eSfb9BBBlMVOmSB814H9o2v4P3mRdEOJa3Gfc~dchF8Qfet51FjoOleG9vTgA__&Key-Pair-Id=K269JMAT9ZF4GZ" alt="">
You&#39;ll notice that you can now actually sort this list by pretty much anything as well as filter it by status or audience.
This is more of a foundational change than a new feature, I know. But there are important features for Buttondown (filtering emails by metadata or tags; sorting by number of opens; an edit interface that isn&#39;t, frankly, hot garbage) that necessitate this change, and it&#39;s an easier way to get a sense of your entire writing corpus beside.
This is the first tranche of a number of exciting changes I&#39;m landing over the next few weeks! If you have any thoughts or concerns or run into any issues, please — as always! — <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a>.

All your emails, in one place

Drag and drop has never been easier. (Just like Gmail.)

One of the delights in watching Buttondown take off over the past few years has been seeing the proliferation of use cases that, frankly, I never really imagined when I started building it. Teachers &amp; faculty are using Buttondown to send lesson plans to their students; a peer group of poets uses Buttondown (&quot;round robin style&quot;, as I&#39;ve been informed) to send over drafts to edit &amp; critique; a food truck sends out weekly locations &amp; specials.
One common thread that I sort of intentionally didn&#39;t handle for a while was sending emails with files attached. This is not a particularly hard technical problem, nor is it a tricky UX problem - the core flow of dragging and dropping a file into an editing interface is all but solved!
The thing that gave me pause for so long was less the surface-level implementation and more the so-called &quot;long tail&quot; of choices and impacts that adding attachments would entail. Should Buttondown add tracking on downloads (so an author can see who&#39;s downloaded what?)? How many attachments are allowed for a given email? What happens to attachments after they&#39;ve been removed from an email? And so on. At risk of turning this anodyne blog post into a bit of a therapy session - this is what building software is like. Even the &quot;easy&quot; things come with hundreds of little microdecisions along the way, and I want to make sure that I get as many of those microdecisions right.
Anyhoo, after hemming and hawing for a fairly long time - attachments have arrived. They are exactly what I think you might expect they are: drag and drop, no fuss or muss. There&#39;s no tracking or anything too-clever-by-half happening. Check it out:
 

<div><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/95ef3cb98fee43c980443f6ada70dc4e" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></div>

 

And when you attach a file to your email, it&#39;s downloadable on the web archive version too.
So - send your emails, with great care and joy and now also with as many (well, up to three) attachments as you&#39;d like.

Attach files to your emails

(Nerd alert! This post is about a fairly nerdy part of Buttondown’s featureset — webhooks. If you’re a less technical user, this stuff probably doesn’t apply to you.)
I’ll be honest with you — it is hard to keep track of the myriad ways folks use Buttondown’s events &amp; webhooks. There are the standard ones: listen to <code>email.created</code> events and then publish the email to the CMS, listen to <code>subscriber.created</code> and <code>subscriber.deleted</code> events to update tags in an internal database, and so on. But the long tail is where I find it hard to keep track: I know of one newsletter, for instance, that is listening to <code>draft.created</code> events to sync their Buttondown drafts with their local iPad storage in a way that I probably can’t advise as good engineering but I am still quite fascinated by.
Regardless of how you’re using webhooks [^1], there’s one piece of feedback that you’ve probably given me: that the dinky little “events” table in the Programming page is… let’s say lackluster.
<img src="/next-assets/img/events1.jpeeg" alt="">
I have heard that feedback. I have internalized it. And now I’ve built something better. Behold the new <a href="https://buttondown.email/events">Events list view</a>:
<img src="/next-assets/img/events2.png" alt="">
Gone is the amateurish limit of 100 events: now you can paginate to your heart’s content! (And yes, that pagination widget is… a little cumbersome at this point, and I will be replacing it with something that requires a little less horizontal scrolling.)
You can filter on both status and event type to make it easier to pinpoint problematic events and replay them:
<img src="/next-assets/img/events3.png" alt="">
In fact, I’m so in love with this filtering component that I plan on backporting it to the subscribers page too to allow more in-depth filtering &amp; sifting there!
Anyway, apologies for how long-overdue this page is. I tend to only hear about the webhooks &amp; events side of things once-per-customer (as they’re setting things up) and then it goes back to being quiet, so I forget how annoying it can be. If there’s any part of the programmatic side of Buttondown that you wish was better, please <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">let me know</a>.
[^1]: And to be clear, per the “nerd alert” preamble at the top of this post — if you don’t even know what a webhook is, that’s completely normal and fine and this post is probably not for you.

A better Events view

Buttondown offers support for Google Authenticator (et al)

I suspect that there are two groups of people who read the title of this blog post: those who are saying &quot;oh finally!&quot; and those who are unfamiliar with the term &#39;multi-factor authentication&#39;.
As you are likely aware, a <a href="https://xkcd.com/936/">strong password</a> is necessary but inefficient in today&#39;s world to protect your account from malicious attackers. The most common family of approaches to defend your account is referred to as &quot;multi-factor authentication&quot;, which is exactly what it sounds like: relying on additional pieces of evidence beyond just your username and password in order to authenticate that you are who you say you are. (Have you ever had to type in a six-digit code that was texted to you, or click a link sent to your email? That&#39;s multi-factor authentication, too!)
Buttondown now lets you protect your account with the help of a third-party authenticator app like <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.authenticator2&hl=en_US&gl=US">Google Authenticator</a> or <a href="https://authy.com/">Authy</a>. These apps exist as a remote fingerprint with a rotating code; when you log into Buttondown, you&#39;ll be prompted for the code from one of these apps.
If pictures are worth a thousand words, screenshares are worth at least fifteen hundred. Here&#39;s a two-minute walkthrough of what registering a QR code looks like and how to log in after doing so:
<div><iframe src="https://www.loom.com/embed/ca6e624ecde645db8be73fd02a7c885c" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></div>

The support I&#39;ve added for authenticator apps is one of many reasonable approaches that folks like to take when it comes to multi-factor authentication. I&#39;ve already received requests for other avenues, such as <a href="https://www.yubico.com/">Yubikey support</a> and SMS support. I plan on expanding coverage in the future; if you have a particular use case you&#39;d like to have me know about, please <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a>!

Secure your account with multi-factor authentication

Introducing teaser emails for paid newsletters

My single favorite way to make Buttondown better is a simple two-step process:
<ol>
<li>Find desire paths where folks are going through a lot of effort to accomplish a very reasonable task.</li>
<li>Make that process better.</li>
</ol>
If you&#39;re an author of a premium newsletter, you might be familiar with what is a pretty annoying process every time you write a paid-subscribers-only email: first you write the paid-subscribers-only email filled with lovely writing and send it off to your loyal subscriber base, then you take a truncated version of it and add a little teaser to send to your non-paying subscribers in order to incentivize them to sign up.
I am here to tell you that is no longer a thing! When choosing a cohort of subscribers to send to, you&#39;ll now see an optional toggle to also send a teaser to unpaid folks:
<img src="/next-assets/img/tease1.png" alt="A screenshot of the draft recipients modal, which allows authors to choose between various cohorts of subscribers.">
By default, Buttondown sends a &quot;teaser&quot; of the first three paragraphs of your newsletter and then prompts readers to subscribe for the rest, just like online:
<img src="/next-assets/img/tease2.png" alt="An example of the &quot;teaser&quot; email Buttondown sends out, with the first few paragraphs included and then a beseechment to upgrade for the rest of the missive.">
If you&#39;d rather supply your own copy, though, it&#39;s as easy as you&#39;d otherwise expect. And the custom teaser is template-friendly, so you can add <a href="">all the metadata and variables</a> your heart desires.
<img src="/next-assets/img/tease2.png" alt="A screenshot of the aforementioned draft recipients modal, with custom teaser text supplied. This text will go out to unpaid subscribers in lieu of the first few paragraphs.">
I want to invest more over the next few months in making it not just easy for authors to grow and nurture their subscriber base but to make sure the process of converting those subscribers into paying readers is as easy as possible. This is a good first step, but there&#39;s more, like opt-in pageview &amp; archive tracking, so you can analyze which emails are best at both bringing in new subscribers and converting those subscribers and tiered subscription levels.
But beyond all that, I&#39;m just interested in making Buttondown easier. If you find yourself feeling like it&#39;s taking you twenty clicks to do what should take three, please <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a> and tell me more — I can&#39;t wait to hear from you.
<h3 id="postscript-some-fun-technical-details">Postscript: some fun technical details</h3>
On the technical side of this feature, there were two particularly interesting challenges of note:
<ol>
<li>There are a lot of assumptions around email rendering &amp; broadcasting that I had to unwind, forcing me to tweak the core rendering infrastructure for the first time in around two years. (Nothing bad happened! Yay!) At the core of the trickiness was the fact that the number of inputs to &quot;who should I send this email to?&quot; increased; this trickiness was compounded by the fact that the number of inputs to &quot;how should I render this email for this subscriber&quot; also increased.</li>
<li>You see that second screenshot with the teaser email and how the final paragraph fades into white? That was trickier than it seems (and indeed, trickier than it should be thanks to the vagaries of Gmail!) I tried a number of different masking CSS techniques, all of which got swallowed up by Gmail&#39;s aggressive CSS purging.</li>
</ol>

Send teasers for paid newsletters

You can now send past emails to your subscribers who didn't receive them!

I’m getting tired of starting off all of these feature announcements with some variation of “this might have been the single most frequently requested feature of the past twenty-four months”, but… this might be the single most frequently requested feature of the past twenty-four months [^1]: you can now send previous emails to subscribers in your Subscribers page.
<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOPAp8PXsAE8LRK?format=png&name=small" alt="A screenshot of Buttondown&#39;s new &quot;send email&quot; modal.">
First, though, a bit of background: Buttondown’s subscriber-email relationship has always been intentionally spartan. There are no clever knobs or automation sequences; I’ve intentionally optimized for ease of onboarding and conceptual simplicity over featureness, meaning that all you can really do with an email after sending it is set it to be your ‘welcome email’ that greets new subscribers or use it as scaffolding to build a new email.
Folks have wanted the ability to send arbitrary emails again to new subscribers for a long time, and the reasons they gave have grown extensive:
<ol>
<li>One author wanted to be able to share an email from the day before with a slew of new subscribers who had joined right after an old email went viral;</li>
<li>One author wanted to be able to have a “pre-canned” email for folks with a certain tag to direct them towards other interesting posts that would be relevant to their interests;</li>
<li>One author wanted to be able to resend an email a few times to their subscribers in order to remind them of an upcoming event.</li>
</ol>
And now, you can! Head on over to the <a href="https://buttondown.email/subscribers">Subscribers page</a>, select a few subscribers (or just one), and click the <code>Send archived email</code> button as seen below — you’ll be prompted with your full list of emails to send to folks.
<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOPAkQ3XMAU3ggq?format=png&name=small" alt="">
There are a couple caveats with this feature:
<ul>
<li>You can only resend an email to a subscriber once, so as to avoid spamming (intentional and unintentional!)</li>
<li>You can’t send emails to folks who would otherwise not be eligible to receive them (unsubscribed folks, emails that were marked as spammy, and so on).</li>
<li>Buttondown will intentionally not prevent you from sending a premium-only email to free subscribers (or any combination therein.)</li>
</ul>
But beyond that, the world is your newsletter-y oyster! Please let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see: as always, I <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">love getting emails</a>.
[^1]: Modulo the ones that I had already implemented, that is.

Send archived emails to new subscribers

Use {{ subscribe_form }} to let folks subscribe faster!

A long-standing request that I’ve never quite got to is the ability to throw in subscription forms in the middle of your emails, so that folks who are scrolling through your web archives are prompted to subscribe before the end of the email itself.
This approach is something that I’m sure has vigorous and impressive scientific impacts on your conversion funnel, but moreover it for a long time was my favorite type of feature request, the one that hits two constraints:
<ol>
<li>Is eminently reasonable</li>
<li>Clearly slots into Buttondown’s architecture &amp; surface</li>
</ol>
On that second bit, I haven’t taken full advantage of it yet, but Buttondown now renders every email twice — once for email clients and once for the web archive. This makes it much easier and cleaner to build features like this in the future!
Anyhoo, the magic incantation you’re looking for is:
<pre><code>{{ subscribe_form }}
</code></pre>
As in, if you want a cute little interstitial in the middle of your email you can do something like:
<pre><code>Here’s a cute picture of a dog!

{{ subscribe_form }}

And then here’s an even cuter picture of a dog!
</code></pre>
You get the idea.
You can also check out the full list of magic codes (or to use the technical term, “template variables”) in Buttondown’s documentation <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/odds-and-ends/template-variables">here</a>. If you’re looking for anything else along these lines, let me know — I’m all ears!

Embed your subscribe form in the middle of your writing

Authors now have more control than ever over their data collection

It&#39;s been almost a year since I switched <a href="https://blog.buttondown.email/2021/03/01/opt-in-analytics">tracking &amp; analytics over to be off by default</a>, and the feedback has been unanimously positive, even for the folks who end up enabling it (by which, to be clear, I mean no shade — Buttondown&#39;s official newsletter has click tracking enabled!)
I&#39;ve received a fairly common piece of feedback from privacy-conscious newsletters:
<blockquote>
I love the commitment to less data collection. I wish I could just track open rates without actually tracking clicks, though: I don&#39;t personally care too much about either piece of data, but when I sell to advertisers they often request some rough percentage of opens. Would it be possible to just keep track of opens?
</blockquote>
The answer to that question is now yes! If you head over to your settings page, you&#39;ll see the tracking setting replaced with four checkboxes:
<img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FK9LpZMVcAELmPr?format=png&name=900x900" alt="">
The idea here is simple: rather than a binary state of &quot;track stuff&quot; or &quot;don&#39;t track stuff&quot;, you as an author now have even more control over what information is important for you to keep track of. (And to state the obvious: everything remains off by default, and respects your original settings.)
Buttondown is probably going to shift even more in the data collection direction: I have plans this year to roll out bespoke page view counting, for instance, as well as to pull in some more payments-level data for paid newsletters. But rest assured: every step of the way, you get control over what you want Buttondown to hold onto, and that Buttondown&#39;s data is for all intents and purposes your data.
(As always, if you have any thoughts about this or anything else, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a> — I&#39;m all ears!)

Granular tracking settings

To be blunt, the upselling experience for paid subscribers has been…bad. This is entirely my fault!
When designing the paid subscriptions experience, I had a few blunders:
<ol>
<li>I assumed the majority of paid subscribers would be new subscribers. The flow is optimized for individuals who start out completely unsubscribed, and so the desire path is for folks to immediately be upsold after subscribing.</li>
<li>Buttondown is structured intentionally without much concept of a “subscriber-user”, meaning that subscribers interact with Buttondown entirely with their email address. This is good for portability reasons, but bad for state — meaning that the version of a newsletter that a subscriber views online is nigh-identical that which someone who isn’t subscribed views.</li>
</ol>
Both of these choices manifest in a number of less-than-ideal ways, but one particularly egregious one is the flow by which subscribers upgrade to premium subscriptions. Up until this week, they would have to go to the click a link in the footer of their email, re-input their email address, and then they were prompted to sign up. It was a confusing thing that spawned a lot of emails, and I get it. It was bad! No way around it.
Now, though, things are better. Rather than bore you with some of the technical details of how things are better, I’d like to just show you! This is the page that a subscriber is brought to when they’re prompted to upgrade their subscription in an email:
<img src="https://i.ibb.co/wrhnnYP/image.png" alt="The snazzy new Checkout page">
No fiddling with inputs or remembering what email address they used. Just a simple Stripe-powered checkout page. This has rolled out automatically, and you should see a healthy uplift in conversions!
And if you&#39;re interested in dynamically inserting this link at an opportune moment, you can! The magic template variable is <code>{{ upgrade_url }}</code>, so you&#39;d want to write something like:

Better upselling for premium subscriptions

A few months ago, Stripe launched Payment Links — the absolute easiest way to collect payments (both one-time and on a recurring basis) on the internet with absolutely no code required.
(A disclosure: I work for Stripe! We’re hiring.)
First, take a look at what one of these Payment Links look like (courtesy of a great Buttondown newsletter, <a href="https://www.painscience.com/">Pain Science</a>):
<img src="https://i.ibb.co/yhxRHzn/PainSci.png" alt="An example of a Checkout page generated by Payment Links.">
Historically, the only way you’ve been able to collect paid subscribers for your Buttondown newsletter is by going through Buttondown’s official channels: funnel a subscriber onto your subscribe page (or a page with an embedded subscription widget), collect their email, and then prompt them to pay.
This is a good workflow, but it’s certainly not perfect for all use cases. Buttondown’s subscription paradigm is not perfectly portable, and doesn’t yet support things like Apple Pay or local payment methods common in European markets.
Enter: Payment Links!
<img src="https://i.ibb.co/7V7MMrF/Payment-page.png" alt="The screen to add a new Payment Link in Stripe.">
￼
Because Buttondown integrates directly with your Stripe account, prospective paid subscribers no longer need to go through your Buttondown newsletter to collect payments or subscriptions. You can head over to your Stripe dashboard and generate a Payment Link for your Buttondown subscriptions and instantly get a URL to share with your Twitter followers or Twitch audience or whomever. Buttondown will automatically detect the new subscriptions and create paid subscribers as they come in.
(One thing that Buttondown doesn’t handle at the moment is the ability to generate a subscriber list for customers who have signed up through Stripe for subscriptions to serviced other than Buttondown. If you’re interested in exploring this world — for instance, being able to spin up an arbitrary newsletter based on the customers that are already in your Stripe account — please email me! I’d love to hear more.)
And, as always, if you have any questions, feature requests, or suggestions — I’m all ears. My aim is to make Buttondown as easy to use as possible, and you — yes, you! — probably have some great ideas on how to get there.

Support for Stripe Payment Links

Obligatory &quot;this is not an April Fool&#39;s joke&quot; disclaimer aside: excited to announce that support for pay-what-you-want [^0] subscriptions are now live! You can give it a test run on <a href="https://weeknotes.buttondown.email">weeknotes.buttondown.email</a>.
Setting it up is fairly easy; you go to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">Paid Subscriptions page</a>, hit the ol’ checkbox, choose a cadence, and you’re off to the races.
<img src="/next-assets/img/pwyw.png" alt="">
There are a couple fast follows (to use a slightly obnoxious term) that I plan on adding:
<ul>
<li>Support for minimum amounts. I dithered a bit on this one; I&#39;m not sure how much I loved the concept of slightly perverting &quot;pay what you want&quot; into &quot;pay what you want so long as at it&#39;s at least this much.&quot;</li>
<li>Expanding the Analytics pane to show more information about how much folks are paying. This will get rolled up into a larger workstream around making the Analytics page more focused on paid subscriptions. (If you have burning questions you want me to address, I&#39;m <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">all ears</a>!)</li>
<li>The ability for subscribers to adjust the amount they&#39;re paying without going through the resubscription flow.</li>
</ul>
That&#39;s it! These blog posts are getting shorter and sweeter as time goes on, it appears, but I&#39;m excited to see how people use this — probably the single most common paid subscriptions feature request (after PayPal support. everyone wants PayPal support.)
[^0]: I can&#39;t decide if it&#39;s &quot;Pay-what-you-want&quot; or &quot;pay what you want&quot; or &quot;Pay What You Want&quot;. I will probably, inadvertently end up with using all three styles in the course of writing this blog post.

Pay-what-you-want subscriptions

The single biggest pain point for me in 2020 was the fact that my email service provider did not support HTTPS tracking links. <a href="https://blog.buttondown.email/2021/03/01/opt-in-analytics">Discussion of tracking links aside</a> and <a href="https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-research/2016/03/28/the-importance-of-a-proper-http-strict-transport-security-implementation-on-your-web-server">importance of HSTS aside</a>, this resulted in a truly awful onboarding experience in which people would onboard and send emails through their HTTPS-only domain, discovering in their first newsletter that all of their links were broken in some browsers. The worst thing! You can’t take back emails, and if folks didn’t catch it when drafting (which was sadly often) it meant their first-ever experience with Buttondown was marred.
<h3 id="the-solution">The solution</h3>
I’ve been a huge fan of the folks over at <a href="https://postmarkapp.com/">Postmark</a> for a long time: Buttondown has been using them as a transactional email provider for years. When they launched support for non-transactional emails, I was itching for a reason to try them out — and lo and behold, here is the perfect one!
<h3 id="how-to-use-it-if-youre-not-sending-from-any-custom-domain">How to use it (if you’re not sending from any custom domain)</h3>
All you need to do to start sending from your custom HSTS domain is to go through the regular “sending from a custom domain” flow on your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">Newsletter settings page</a>. Buttondown will automatically detect that you’re sending through an HTTPS-only domain and route your newsletter to use Postmark instead.
<h3 id="how-to-enable-https-tracking-if-you-are-already-sending-from-a-custom-domain">How to enable HTTPS tracking (if you are already sending from a custom domain)</h3>
This is... a little jankier. Go ahead and remove your custom domain, and then re-add it — you should now see a new set of custom DNS records to use. Once you’ve added them, go ahead and re-enable analytics tracking and you’re good to go!
<h3 id="any-questions">Any questions?</h3>
As always, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">my inbox is open</a>!

Support for HTTPS tracking links

Last week I blogged about <a href="/2021/02/21/importer-v2">investments in something that existing users will probably not appreciate</a>
and it appears that this week I am continuing the trend by announcing a change that only affects new
accounts going forward:
Buttondown is turning off analytics by default. (This only applies to new accounts: I haven&#39;t changed any settings on existing accounts.)
This is something that a few folks have mentioned over the years:
allowing newsletters to opt out of link and open tracking is nice but allowing an escape hatch
is a little less opinionated than defaulting to do the right thing.
I was fortunate enough to get <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/26/buttondown">Fireballed</a>
this past week, and one of John&#39;s comments rekindled this notion:
<blockquote>
Buttondown’s privacy “win” is that it at least allows you to turn tracking off with a simple checkbox. Most services don’t. I can’t find any hosted service that doesn’t offer tracking period, or even defaults to no tracking.
</blockquote>
If you&#39;ll let me wax poetic about running a service for a second: it is tiring to make decisions, and it is easy to think from the outside that certain artifacts are deliberate as opposed to made from a lack of decision.
Analytics being opt-out wasn’t deliberate so much as it was an artifact of that being originally implemented as an opt-out and then me not changing anything or revisiting it in the past three years.
But that&#39;s how building things on a temporal budget goes, and &quot;lack of decision&quot; is not meaningfully better than a bad decision: it is useful to get the codebase
viewed from a completely contextless lens, and to strip away a bit of the archaelogical detritus that comes from remembering the Buttondown of 2021 and the Buttondown of 2019 and the Buttondown of 2017.
Anyhoo. Now it&#39;s opt-in, because opinionated defaults matter. And all it was was a single line of code:
<img src="/next-assets/img/optin.png" alt="">
As a reminder, if you want to opt out (or now in) to analytics, all you have to do is go to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">Account settings page</a>.
And stay tuned for more news on the privacy &amp; sensible data front! My goal is to push out some changes that let you
get information about your newsletter without having to go whole hog on the tracking pixel front, like conditionally enabling clicks but not opens (or vice versa)
and adding support for anonymized tracking (so you know what is opened or clicked on without knowing who.)

Email tracking is now off by default

<img src="/next-assets/img/plausible.png" class="kg-image" />

<a href="https://plausible.io/">Plausible</a> is a simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It&#39;s fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and offers no cookie use whatsoever. It&#39;s a great way to learn more about your site and your subscribers &amp; visitors while respecting their privacy.
I&#39;ve been a huge fan of what Plausible has been doing, and I&#39;m excited to partner with them and integrate our two services: their ethos is very well-aligned with Buttondown&#39;s.
Integrating with your Plausible Analytics account is simple and takes all of five minutes! You can integrate with your newsletter and track viewers of your archives, plus see what visitors are clicking on the most and which of your archive pages are most effective at getting folks to subscribe.
You can read more about how to do so <a href="https://www.notion.so/Plausible-92963063561840709c7571c7ec8db261">here</a>!
Thanks for reading, and as always <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">let me know</a> if you have any questions!

You can now integrate with Plausible!

<img src="/next-assets/img/buttondown-v2.png" class="kg-image" />

This is perhaps a strange and unhelpful blog post to write. You see, I have spent the past few weeks overhauling the subscriber import experience, and I am quite proud of this.
Why is this strange and unhelpful to write about? Because if you’re reading this blog you are either a Buttondown user already — and you have no need for importing — or you’re not a Buttondown user — and your decision to use Buttondown is likely not going to be swayed by its data onboarding capabilities.
But! Nonetheless!
One of my goals entering 2021 was to reduce the amount of time I — your humble administrator and proprietor — spent on onboarding tasks by automating them out of existence, to carve out more time for actual improvement of Buttondown as a product. One of the top “menial labor” tasks on this list was subscriber importing: Buttondown offers one-click importing for most of the classic other sources of CSVs-containing-emails, but these are fairly dumb mechanisms that don’t account for things like tags or metadata. It’s a black box: drop in this CSV and Buttondown will try very hard to get some stuff out of it.
This new importing experience though, is much better! You can trace the journey from the beginning from my <a href="https://twitter.com/justinmduke/status/1355993756265107457">Twitter thread</a>, but it offers a lot of useful things: you can pull in metadata, you can pull in tags, you can override specific columns, and the general experience feels a little more polished than “here click this button”.
<h3 id="subscriber-importing--onboarding">Subscriber importing != onboarding</h3>
Subscriber importing is not the whole story when it comes to a more seamless (for you and for me) onboarding experience, though. There are still a lot of things that are rough around the edges:
<ol>
<li>Contact importing from Google/GitHub is flagged off and needs to be revamped.</li>
<li>Archival importing is a little flaky around the edges and can use a fresh coat of paint.</li>
<li>DNS onboarding is a whole can of worms, thanks to inconsistencies within domain name providers.</li>
</ol>
But the work here, both philosophically and pragmatically, is a useful start. A lot of the affordances I’ve built out with this new importing mechanisms carry on nicely to different parts of the onboarding process: the nice frontend multi-step modal will be reused in future onboarding revamps, and I think I’m getting to a point where I can more strongly reason about the “onboarding journey” (even as I hate myself for using that term.)
We’re not so far away from something that actually feels like a pleasant and fun onboarding process and not being thrown into a set of six different settings pages and eighteen different modals.
Or perhaps we are still far away from that point — but measurably and significantly less so than we were last month.
Either way. Thanks for reading, and as always <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">let me know</a> if you have any questions!

A nicer subscriber importing experience

You&#39;ve been able to reference subscriber metadata in your emails for
a while now. This is a great way of creating a mail-merge-esque effect
and customizing your newsletter for your recipients:
<pre><code>
{% if subscriber.metadata.first_name %}
Hello {{ subscriber.metadata.first_name }}!
{% else %}
Hello friend!
{% endif %}
</code></pre>
You can now take this a step further if you&#39;re using tags! Tags are useful
ways of bucketing or grouping your subscribers already, but sometimes you want
to send slight variations of the same newsletter to multiple tags. To do so is simple:
<pre><code>
{% if &quot;seattle&quot; in subscriber.tags %}
Hope you&#39;re enjoying the snow up in Seattle this weekend!
{% else if &quot;san francisco&quot; in subscriber.tags %}
Hope you&#39;re enjoying the fog down in San Fran this weekend!
{% else %}
Hope the weather is pleasant wherever you are this weekend!
{% endif %}
</code></pre>
(Though I certainly and sincerely hope you write something less stilted than the above.)
Buttondown&#39;s templating engine is based on <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/templates/language/">Django</a>&#39;s, meaning that you can do a lot of other things.
Such as sending a paragraph if someone isn&#39;t tagged with a given tag:
<pre><code>
{% if &quot;python&quot; not in subscriber.tags %}
I know you&#39;re not interested in Python that much, but I think you&#39;ll still
enjoy learning about the new [walrus operator](https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.8.html)
{% endif %}
</code></pre>
Or handling logic if someone doesn&#39;t have any tags at all:
<pre><code>
{% if not subscriber.tags %}
I&#39;d like to know more about you! Fill out a form [here](https://typeform.com).
{% endif %}
</code></pre>
That&#39;s it for now! If there are other programmatic/template-y use cases you&#39;d like to see Buttondown tackle, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">my inbox is open</a>

Referencing subscriber tags in your newsletter

<img src="/next-assets/img/currency-dropdown.png" class="kg-image" />

For a long time (as in, up until today), Buttondown could only charge in dollars for
paid newsletters. This is no longer the case!
I&#39;m honestly not sure what else to write here. The code change was pretty boring (thanks, Stripe!). This
was long overdue; the number of newsletters outside America outnumber the number of newsletters inside America.
I&#39;m happy I was able to make the change.
<img src="/next-assets/img/paid-subscriptions-4.png" class="kg-image" />

If you haven&#39;t set up a paid newsletter and you&#39;re interested in doing so, it&#39;s
as painless as starting a business on the internet could be! Just go over to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">Paid subscriptions page</a> and check it out!
(If you&#39;re interested in charging in a currency that isn&#39;t currently listed in the page, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">shoot me an email</a>
and I&#39;ll get it added for you!)

Accept whatever currency you want for your paid newsletter

It is somewhat rare for me to be able to justify working on paying down some technical debt
with a rewrite while also improving the user experience, especially for a little-loved
part of the application like the various settings pages.
With the <a href="/2021/01/06/webhooks-and-the-programming-page">recent work to add the new Programming page</a>, I found myself equipped with a host of new front-end components to replace the old way I designed settings. They&#39;re not much to look at now, but it means I can replace a bunch of bespoke HTML and CSS with something that looks consistent across all parts of the application.
The way I could justify retrofitting the new components into an existing page was simple: I wanted to start surfacing a lot of the necessary details you need to set up and customize the design of your newsletter in the application itself, rather than confining those details to documentation or Notion pages.
The result is a settings page that looks much the same, but with more information and detail
than before:
<img src="/next-assets/img/ss4.png" class="kg-image" />

Go over to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings/design">Design page</a> and check it out!

Slightly nicer Design settings

If you check your nav bar, you’ll notice a <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings/programming">new little section entitled Programming</a>. This is, as you might expect, a tab for programming your newsletter! Buttondown is getting more and more advanced at creating technical and advanced use cases for our authors, and I wanted a place to put all of these features without crowding out other parts of the dashboard.
So, if you’re not interested in supercharging your newsletter (and I don’t mean that in a bad way at all: none of my newsletters are using webhooks!) feel free to ignore this. But if you’re interested in seeing how to better integrate Buttondown into your stack, let’s dive in!
<img src="/next-assets/img/30.png" alt="">
<h2 id="api-key">API Key</h2>
<img src="/next-assets/img/31.png" alt="">
The Programming page is where you can find your API key. This was previously buried at the bottom of the main settings page for no other reason than “I didn’t know of a better place to put it.” Here is that better place!
<h2 id="webhooks">Webhooks</h2>
Now we’re getting to the exciting stuff. After almost an entire year in private beta, webhooks are now live.
I will spare you the how and the why and the what of webhooks: more talented writers, particularly the fine folks over at <a href="https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks">Stripe</a> and <a href="https://workos.com/blog/building-webhooks-into-your-application-guidelines-and-best-practices">WorkOS</a>, have done a better job than I ever will.
I think the most interesting bit to dive into is specifically what event types are possible with webhooks:
<ol>
<li>Email creations</li>
<li>Subscriber creations</li>
<li>Subscriber churns</li>
<li>Unsubscribes</li>
<li>Subscriber trial beginnings and endings, for paid newsletters</li>
<li>Subscriber updates to metadata or notes</li>
</ol>
If you think I’m missing anything, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">let me know</a> — there’s always going to be an updated list on <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/api-reference/introduction">the API schema</a>.
To create a webhook, all you need to do is set the URL, a description, and what event type you want that webhook to receive:
<img src="/next-assets/img/33.png" alt="">
<h2 id="events">Events</h2>
<img src="/next-assets/img/32.png" alt="">
Of course, webhooks are nice, but it’s important to understand what is actually getting fed into those webhooks, and your Events table gives you an overview of all events flowing through your account. Each event is listed here, along with the metadata and the payload that would be sent.
Notably, if you’re looking to test a part of your integration you can actually replay events from this view by clicking on the relevant event and hitting the “Replay event” button. This makes it easy for you to stage your webhooks without having to rely on manual traffic.
<img src="/next-assets/img/34.png" alt="">
<h2 id="api-requests">API requests</h2>
<img src="/next-assets/img/35.png" alt="">
Lastly, if you’ve wired together an API integration with Buttondown, you get a nice administrative view of all of your previous requests along with latency, success, and response information. You can use this to debug any problems you have with your integration.

Webhooks and the Programming page

One of my favorite features in any app ever is Gmail’s “undo” feature. You are probably aware of this nicety if you’ve ever accidentally hit Send on something a few minutes too soon (or, if you are like me, you notice a typo literally right as you press the Send Button). What I find magic about this feature is that it transforms something that is a putatively immutable task (sending an email! Into the ether! where it can never be removed again!) into something significantly less so, over time deconditioning you (or at least me) from thinking sending email is something stressful and irreversible into something that doesn’t raise your blood pressure.
All of that is an overly verbose preamble to say something very simple: Buttondown now has an “undo send” feature. Buttondown already makes sure you really want to hit send by asking you to confirm your email, but now it goes the extra mile and lets you undo for up to two minutes.
Here&#39;s what it looks like. Unexciting, I know:
<img src="/next-assets/img/29.png" alt="">

Undo send

Buttondown’s navigation has... not been ideal. For a long time.
The navigation itself has barely changed since it got set in stone in early 2017; you can see it in action (with slightly different CSS, and no dropdown menu) in a blog post from <a href="https://blog.buttondown.email/2017/08/01/subscriber-and-archive-search">2017</a>!
I say it’s not ideal for a handful of reasons:
<ul>
<li>The mobile experience is trapped in a state of “trying to be cute” and looking like a tab bar</li>
<li>There’s a weird bifurcation between the primary navigation of “Write / Subscribers / Archive” and the secondary navigation (to, say, tags or scheduled emails) because I wasn’t smart enough to figure out an extensible navigation.</li>
<li>Important links (say, to documentation, or pricing details) are hidden in the Footer and completely inaccessible once you’ve logged in.</li>
</ul>
I’ve been meaning to take another stab at navigation for a while now: every time I add a new settings subpage or nested modal the situation grows a little more dire, and it is finally time to tear off the bandaid.
Behold!
<img src="/next-assets/img/40.png" alt="">
...Oh wow. That’s rather spare, isn’t it?
Let’s dive into these two new affordances.
<h3 id="omni-search">Omni-search</h3>
<img src="/next-assets/img/41.png" alt="">
As you might guess from the title of this heading, “omni-search” is a universal search bar. You can search for all sorts of things:
<ol>
<li>Subscribers</li>
<li>Archives</li>
<li>Internal and external pages</li>
<li>Documentation</li>
</ol>
The search bar is fast, it is accessible, and it is always a keystroke away (just hit <code>/</code>).
<h3 id="the-big-ol-dropdown">The big ol’ dropdown</h3>
<img src="/next-assets/img/42.png" alt="">
This dropdown should look pretty similar to the old one, except with, well, more of it. Gone are the weird sub-navigation hierarchies: everything is just here.
<h3 id="change-is-hard-i-know">Change is hard, I know.</h3>
I’m fairly sensitive to the fact that changing workflows and interfaces is onerous and painful. Adjustment takes time! This is a pretty opinionated interface, but it feels scalable in a way that the previous interface certainly was not. I apologize for whatever short-term friction this causes you, and please send me <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">feedback</a> if you’d like: I’m always open to methods for making Buttondown a better experience.

Navigation updates

I am particularly excited to share that I am now forwarded some traffic through the EU. You may be wondering: uh, why?
Well, for starters, this means you can make sure your customer data and emails are processed without leaving the EU. There&#39;s increasing complexity in how to manage data, and also a healthy dose of better-safe-than-sorryism.
Plus, location matters. EU-borne emails are going to be faster and have better inbox placement rates than US-borne emails if the majority of your subscribers are European.
I haven&#39;t exposed this as a setting yet in Buttondown (it is not obvious to me that I ever will, since it seems like a niche request), but if you&#39;re interested, please <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a> and I&#39;ll flag you in!

Open Beta: European mail servers

I like building features that give you, the beloved customer, the power to customize Buttondown as you see fit.
Generally these are happy features: better analytics, smart scheduling, that sort of thing.
Sometimes, though, people unsubscribe. Buttondown gives them a curt and plain exit survey asking them why they unsubscribed, but you can now override that default with a link of your choice.
Personally, I&#39;m a little bitter whenever someone unsubscribes, and I want them to know that I take it personally. So I&#39;ve overwritten my unsubscription URL to something a little special:
<img src="/next-assets/img/28.png" alt="">
Curious what that gif is? <a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/come-back-I5abkrE7RPO3C">Take a look</a>.

Set a custom unsubscription URL for your unsubscribers

It&#39;s nice to look at your deliver rates and open rates for a single email, but if you&#39;re trying to really understand its performance, it&#39;s important to understand it in the context of your other recent issues.
This is now much easier!
Just select a handful of emails in your <a href="https://buttondown.email/emails">Archive page</a>:
<img src="/next-assets/img/26.png" alt="">
And hit that new lil &quot;Analytics&quot; button towards the top of the page. Voila!
<img src="/next-assets/img/27.png" alt="">
I know, I know — this isn&#39;t exactly groundbreaking stuff. But it&#39;s a start, and you can expect more (and more interesting) analytics work coming in the next few months!

Compare analytics from multiple emails

Many folks write newsletters with a friend or frequent collaborator. I write a personal letter, <a href="https://buttondown.email/letters-to-j">Letters to J</a>, with a good friend, for instance, and I would be remiss if I didn&#39;t send any more official Buttondown emails without sending a draft to my partner and de facto copyeditor for a second pair of eyes.
Buttondown now makes this process slightly easier by keeping track of who you&#39;ve sent drafts to in the past, so you don&#39;t have to go through the ever-so-onerous of retyping email addresses each time:
<img src="/next-assets/img/25.png" alt="">
To check out the new flow, click that &quot;Choose draft recipients&quot; button at the right-hand side of your send draft button. Happy copy-editing!

Saved draft recipients

The &quot;annual plan upsell&quot; is a classic piece of software marketing advice. Take it from the folks at <a href="https://www.profitwell.com/blog/here-is-why-every-saas-company-needs-an-annual-plan">Profitwell</a>:
<blockquote>
But having that money up front means that you can make more investment in your business, growing your user base and boosting your revenue.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A lump sum payment into your bank account can be a lifesaver for a new SaaS business. It can help cover customer acquisition costs and allow you to invest in your company, paying for office space, key new hires, and great SaaS services yourself.
</blockquote>
(Ignore the fact that Buttondown doesn&#39;t offer an annual plan yet. If you&#39;re interested in one, <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a> and I&#39;ll get you sorted.)
But! I digress. Annual plans are good for software business and they are good for newsletters for largely the same reasons. Lump-sum payments mean that you can have longer relationships with your readers, less month-to-month fluctuation, and better forecasting for the year ahead.
Which is why I am thoroughly pumped to have added annual pricing to Buttondown&#39;s paid newsletters. It&#39;s fairly self-explanatory, but take a gander.
<img src="/next-assets/img/19.png" alt="">
Look at that subtle and yet deeply compelling upsell opportunity! [^1]
<img src="/next-assets/img/20.png" alt="">
Or to give it a whirl in &#39;real life&#39;, try subscribing to <a href="https://weeknotes.buttondown.email">Weeknotes</a>.
This is part of a suite of upcoming work to make paid newsletters more of a first-class citizen on Buttondown. If you&#39;re interested, I&#39;m <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">always open</a> to suggestions.
[^1]: Don&#39;t worry, I&#39;m being mostly facetious.

Annual subscriptions for paid newsletters

Building an audience (or to use the slightly more concise, slightly more cynical term, list building) is mostly an art of navigating a spectrum between maximum conversions and maximum subscriber quality. [^1]
On one end of the spectrum, you can imagine a completely open sieve: a text input that sits on the internet, blessedly naive, ready for any enterprising individual to plop an email in and hit &quot;submit&quot;. There are no barriers to entry: no validations, no typo checking, no spam detection, no CAPTCHA.
If you collect email addresses like this, well — you&#39;ll get a lot of email addresses! And a lot of garbage, too:
<ul>
<li>people typing <code>gamil.com</code> instead of <code>gmail.com</code></li>
<li>spammers and malicious actors trying to use your mailing list for nefarious purposes</li>
<li>undeliverable email addresses</li>
<li>garbage strings</li>
</ul>
On the other end of the spectrum, you can imagine a careful and meticulous screening process: every potential email address is manually added, after careful and personal vetting, by you. You have utmost confidence that each email is kosher (whether it&#39;s by cross-referencing it with a person you know or some other database), but it&#39;s completely locked down to the outside world. Your list will be high-quality, but it won&#39;t grow very quickly (or without much manual labor.)
Buttondown&#39;s approach, naturally, is somewhere in between. We do a lot of automatic verifications [^2], like making sure that new subscribers&#39; have syntactically correct email addresses with valid MX records and haven&#39;t been reported for spam.
We also optionally allow what&#39;s called &quot;double opt-in&quot;. This is the industry term for &quot;make subscribers confirm their email addresses before I send stuff to them&quot;; you&#39;ve probably run into this before.
But the thing about double-opt in is that it&#39;s sort of a black box. You don&#39;t have a great sense of why folks aren&#39;t opting-in; some of them might be bots or spammers, sure, but a pretty common worry is just that hey, people have lots of emails, and the confirmation email may have been lost in the torrent.
That&#39;s why I&#39;m excited to have launched subscription reminders, which is exactly what it sounds like: you can send emails to folks who haven&#39;t confirmed their address to remind them gently about your beautiful newsletter. [^3].
Simply go to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/subscribers">Subscribers</a> page and choose the &quot;Unconfirmed subscribers&quot; filter, and you&#39;re good to go:
<img src="/next-assets/img/17.png" alt="">
They&#39;ll get a nice lil email in their inbox reminding them of the exciting task ahead of them:
<img src="/next-assets/img/18.png" alt="">
[^1]: This is, to be fair, true of most conversion funnels; you&#39;re always going to be either sacrificing conversion rate for conversion quality or vice versa.
[^2]: Software! Truly, a miracle.
[^3]: And you can only do it a few times, to make sure things don&#39;t become overbearing.

Reminding folks to confirm their subscription

(I'm going to try really hard to not make some sort of doing it for the 'gram reference in this post.)((Well, I guess I just upped and did it, huh?))Okay.  Just like how you can embed tweets or gists into your email by dropping in a URL, you can now do the same thing with Instagram!<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="/next-assets/img/uploads/screen-shot-2019-07-30-at-8.41.42-pm.png" class="kg-image" /></figure>You don't need to enable anything or connect anything.  Just drop in a URL and, like everything (okay, most things) in Buttondown, it just works.  (The best part is that it's all HTML and CSS — no Javascript! — meaning that it works great in every single email client, and you don't have to worry about lazy loading or fallbacks or <code>noscript</code>.)Interested in embedding anything else easily?  <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">Let me know</a>.

Embedding Instagram photos into your emails

It's as easy as clicking a button on your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">Account</a> page.Specifically, this button:<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="/next-assets/img/ss2.png" class="kg-image" /></figure>(Okay, and then "Update settings".  Two buttons, then.)Additionally, we'll be launching support for letting subscribers opt out of tracking &amp; analytics later this month — stay tuned for the announcement there.

How to opt out of analytics and email tracking

Creating or iterating through your Buttondown drafts is now even easier (well, if you&#39;re the type of person who thinks <code>cURL</code> and <a href="https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/">Requests</a> is easy — at which point, like, don&#39;t worry, you&#39;re amongst friends.)
Drafts, of course, are emails that you&#39;re still working on or tinkering with, or things that you might want to flesh out later without commiting to an actual send.  You can access them through the API and, of course, through the <a href="https://buttondown.email/emails/drafts">Drafts</a> page.
Because drafts are now accessible via the API, they&#39;re also accessible via Buttondown&#39;s <a href="https://zapier.com/app/login?next=/developer/public-invite/10328/3f461ccf51be6e2e3f356c7365434907/">Zapier integration</a>, which is of course free and publicly available to use.

Managing your drafts through the API

Do you have multiple newsletters?  Or have you thought about starting a second newsletter, but it sounded like a massive pain that just would not be very fun at all?Boy, do I have some news for you.We've got support for multiple newsletters.  Instead of logging out and back in every time you want to switch things, it's accessible from a handy little dropdown in the top-right corner of the screen (the same way you get to, say, Settings) and in comes a handy lil modal letting you choose:<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D78kia7VUAAAGn4?format=png&name=900x900" class="kg-image" /></figure>It's still in a little bit of a janky phase — for instance, I haven't built out a UI to add multiple newsletters, so I need to do it manually — but if you're interested in it <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">send me an email</a>.  So far there are a couple dozen folks using it and loving it — you should join us!

Open Beta: Multiple newsletters

Here was a fun thing to work on: subscriber filters.<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="/next-assets/img/ss3.png" class="kg-image" /></figure>This is my favorite brand of Buttondown feature: solve an obvious problem with established interfaces.  As of now, you can answer a handful of important and pertinent questions with a mere two clicks:<ol><li>Who has unsubscribed from my newsletter? (Okay, you could have answered this one for a while, but now it's in a more semantically relevant part of the interface.)</li><li>Who has subscribed to my newsletter that Buttondown has deemed is kinda spammy? (The obvious followup question to this is: "well if you thought they were spammy, why would you let them subscribe in the first place?", to which the answer is: "we don't, but sometimes you may import a spammy subscriber or an email address reveals itself later to be spammy")</li><li> What subscribers have bounced from my newsletter? ("bounced" is email-speak for "we tried to send them an email and couldn't, so we won't try in the future.")</li><li>Which subscribers haven't opened my emails in a while? (The cutoff here is fairly arbitrary — three emails — and I might expand it in the future.)</li></ol>That's it!  Test it out.  Is there a filter you're dying for that doesn't exist? <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">Send me an email</a> and let me know.

Easy subscriber filters

Scheduled emails has always been an important part of Buttondown’s platform.  I use it every time I send out a newsletter update, whether it’s a <a href="https://newsletter.buttondown.email">new feature</a> or a <a href="https://weeknotes.buttondown.email">weekly update</a>.

And — without beating around the bush too much — you can now schedule emails through the API!  With a simple API request, you can now schedule an email to get sent out next Tuesday!
Or with just a handful lines of, say, Python code:
<pre><code>import os
import requests
API_KEY = os.environ[&quot;BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY&quot;]
API_URL = &quot;https://api.buttondown.email&quot;
ENDPOINT = &quot;/v1/scheduled-emails&quot;
data = {
&quot;subject&quot;: &quot;Check out this email from the API&quot;,
&quot;body&quot;: &quot;Hopefully the content is dope!&quot;,
&quot;publish_date&quot;: &quot;2020-05-08T12:00:00&quot;
}
requests.post(f&quot;{API_URL}{ENDPOINT}&quot;, data ,headers={
&quot;Authorization&quot;: f&quot;Token {API_KEY}&quot;
})
</code></pre>
And of course, this works out of the box with any other way you might want to use Buttondown’s API — like, say, <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209055">Siri Shortcuts</a> or <a href="https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/10328/3f461ccf51be6e2e3f356c7365434907/">Zapier</a>.  Because APIs are neat.(If you’re not familiar with Buttondown’s API, check out our <a href="https://api.buttondown.email">schema</a> and <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">head over to your Settings page</a> to grab your API key!)

Scheduling emails through the API

This blog post will help you with the most important thing you care about if you're writing and sending a newsletter: making sure your newsletter ends up in your subscribers' inboxes, and not in the Spam folder.  If your newsletter isn't doing this, then no brilliant writing or incredible tactics matters — it's all going to waste.So let's talk about the most important step in doing this: verifying your domain!The biggest part of making sure your newsletter gets delivered is by making sure you're the one sending it; that, as far as your email address is concerned, you are who you say you are.You see, spammers and malicious actors like to impersonate others (specifically, their email addresses) in order to trick folks into giving personal information or misreading an email — in order to solve this, email hosts like Gmail and Yahoo have developed the concepts of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail">DKIM</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework">SPF</a> records, which are sort of optional drivers' licenses for emails: they sit on your domain and verify that you're giving your newsletter application the right to send emails on your behalf.SPF and DKIM have gotten so prevalent, and so important, that Gmail now only shares images from domains that have valid SPF and DKIM messages:<blockquote> And we only display images by default for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_authentication">authenticated</a> messages (using SPF or DKIM).</blockquote>It's important to choose a newsletter provider that lets you send your emails through SPF and DKIM.  Thankfully, with Buttondown it's easy:<ul><li>Signup for a <a href="https://buttondown.email/signup">free account</a>, if you don't already have one.</li><li>Next, navigate to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">settings</a> page and put in your desired domain into the "custom domain" setting.</li><li>Go to your DNS provider of choice and input the requested records.</li><li>Go back to your settings page and verify that the records are set up correctly (it can take some time for them to propagate)</li></ul>That's it!  It should only take a couple minutes for you to get trustworthy, high-deliverability emails that end up in your subscribers' inboxes.

<h3 id="if-you-dont-have-a-custom-domain">If you don&#39;t have a custom domain</h3>
If you aren&#39;t sending emails from a custom domain (and your main email is through Hotmail, ProtonMail, Gmail, or another common provider), another good tactic to ensure high deliverability is sending using Buttondown&#39;s email address for your account rather than your own.
This is because many mailboxes penalize conflicting addresses on emails (&quot;This email says it&#39;s coming from justin at gmail.com but it&#39;s actually coming from justin at buttondown.email...looks suspicious!&quot;).
This is easy and free to do: just check the box that says Would you like to send emails from Buttondown&#39;s domain? in your Settings page.

Sending newsletters that get delivered

Listen. I've never claimed to be a great designer. (If we're being honest, I've never claimed to be a designer at all.) . And for a long time, the <a href="https://buttondown.email/jmduke/archive/80eff1ea-b1cc-4748-9a32-a47dfddc0bc8">email detail pages</a> left a certain something to be desired: the text was small and wide and almost actively disincentivized the act of reading.
Well, uh, that was bad. And now it's less bad! Text is larger, narrower, and altogether more pleasant to read. Let's take a look at the before and after:
Isn't that nicer?
You don't need to do anything to enable this — it's automatic. If you ever have feedback on the look and feel of your newsletter, please reach out: I'd love to hear it!

Nicer archive pages!

Listen, I love Markdown. It's 50% of the reason why I started Buttondown: I wanted to be able to draft emails easily with as little markup as possible.
But not everyone does! It's weird, and if you're not technical you probably haven't had too much exposure to it.
Which is why I'm happy to announce one of the most heavily requested features of all time: a simple, elegant toolbar to assist with marking up your email if you're not comfortable with writing Markdown by hand.
It pops right up, just hit the ol' &quot;Show toolbar&quot; toggle and feast your eyes!

Markdown is easier than ever

We've offered analytics for your emails for a while now, which is great: it's awesome to see what emails are really resonating with your subscribers and which ones, uh, aren't.
But often it's important to get even more introspection into how folks interact with your emails. We want you to be able to use Buttondown to answer questions like:
<ul>
<li>Do people click on links about Python more than they click on links about software development as a whole?</li>
<li>Who keeps my emails kicking around in their inbox for weeks before finally diving in?</li>
<li>Which of my subscribers are forwarding my emails to friends and colleagues?</li>
</ul>
Today we're launching the first step of that: subscriber events. Now you can see exactly how a given subscriber interacts with your emails over time: when they open them, what they click on, and so on.
This is the first step in a series of changes we're planning for revamping Buttondown's analytics, and its something we're super excited about.
As always, if you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">email me</a>!

Introducing subscriber events

<img src="/next-assets/img/51.png" alt="" />
I'll be honest. I hate learning about unsubscribed folks. It stresses me out.
But many of you do not feel that way, and want a way to keep track of folks who have unsubscribed from your newsletter. I've been meaning to surface this information for a while, and now Buttondown offers a <a href="https://buttondown.email/subscribers/unsubscribers">unsubscribers page</a> so you can learn more about folks who have moved on to greener pastures.
(Unsubscribers are prompted for the reason why they unsubscribed. If they fill it out, that information will be surfaced here as well!)
If you're especially masochistic, I've also added a setting sending you email notifications whenever someone unsubscribes. It is rife with sad gifs.
<img src="/next-assets/img/52.jpg" alt="" />
Hope you find this useful! Or, if you are terrified by the possibility of rejection, then just ignore it. Either one is completely rational to me.

Learning about unsubscribed users

I'm excited to announce that our integration with <a href="https://www.fullcontact.com/">FullContact</a> is now live, giving you more insight into your subscribers.
It scans the internet for information about new emails, annotating it with names, websites, and social media presences. Here's an example!
<img src="/next-assets/img/5.png" alt="FC.png" />
(There's nothing you need to enable or change. Enjoy the new feature!)

Learn more about your subscribers!

Tags are great on their own, but there's no fun segmenting your subscribers if you can't actually do anything with those segments, right?
Well, um. Now there is something you can do with them. And it's exactly what you'd expect! In a good way. If you have tags, you can now send a newsletter to a specific tag (or list of tags).
<img src="https://cloud.headwayapp.co/changelogs_images/images/big/000/007/307-2462bfd074e734af511e0a93d3d5e6782f0d5405.gif" alt="tag-send.gif" />

Send emails to certain tags!

Subscribers who have <a href="https://gravatar.com">Gravatars</a> will now be annotated with their faces!
<img src="/next-assets/img/4.png" alt="Screen Shot 2017-08-12 at 7.13.26 PM.png" />

Gravatar support

Whether you're just curious or want to optimize your pages for subscription, it's important to find out where folks are subscribing from. For that end, we've built out some basic referral tracking to see what page brought subscribers to your site:
<img src="/next-assets/img/3.png" alt="Screen Shot 2017-08-11 at 8.55.04 AM.png" />
This is the first step towards a more comprehensive understanding of subscriber analytics. Some stuff down the pipeline in the semi-near future:
<ol>
<li>Support for UTM tracking as well.</li>
<li>Visualization of referrals by source.</li>
<li>Digests of new subscribers.</li>
</ol>

Subscriber sources

We've released an iFrame that lets you embed a tiny snippet of HTML in your blog or web page to collect subscribers without having visitors leave that page at all! Find it in your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">share page</a>.
<img src="/next-assets/img/2.png" alt="Screen Shot 2017-08-06 at 9.40.03 AM.png" />

Embeddable subscription widget

One of our most-requested features is the ability to send an email and have it transform into a draft.
That's now a thing!
You can go to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/emails/drafts/">drafts page</a> to find your personal email address: send something there and the subject + body of the email are automatically converted into the draft. This can be super handy if you want to jot down some thoughts on the go!
<img src="/next-assets/img/1.png" alt="Screen Shot 2017-07-22 at 11.37.44 AM.png" />

Creating drafts via email

Managing a bunch of emails and subscribers can be, uh, a chore.
Now it's less so! There's a handy lil search bar at the top right of both pages. Type stuff in and we'll find what you're looking for.!
<img src="https://cloud.headwayapp.co/changelogs_images/images/big/000/005/816-4e31fb9beb0e081a6ab712ea25a21d765337f0d2.gif" />

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