Mailing

Mailing is optional: turn it on under Settings > Mailing Lists. People sign up to your mailing lists (and confirm by email), and you send them campaigns and a weekly digest through Mailgun from a marketing subdomain. Each email’s deliveries, opens and clicks are recorded. The site’s other email (form notifications, tickets) goes out over SMTP as before. Mailgun’s setup is under Hosting.

Settings

Under Settings > Mailing Lists (admins):

• Sender: the name and the address before @ your Mailgun domain (default news), and where replies go.
• Postal address: every email shows it, as the law requires. Nothing is sent until it’s there.
• Consent wording under sign-up forms, kept with each sign-up.
• Lists offered to members (with Members on).
• Track links and UTM parameters for new campaigns.
• Pause sending when spam complaints or bounces pass a rate (default 0.1% and 2%), checked once a campaign has 500 deliveries. Everything stops, digests included, and the admins are emailed, until an admin resumes sending on the Mailing Lists screen.

Lists and signing up

Add lists on the Mailing Lists screen (in the admin menu once Mailing is on), Lists tab: name, description and Public, then Add list. Lists are for anyone, members or not. View subscribers on each list shows who is on it. Public lists are offered by sign-up forms and on the email preferences page; the others are for people you add yourself.

Put the Subscribe block (Mailing group in the block list) anywhere: email, an optional name, the public lists to choose from when there are several, the consent wording and a button. The site also has a page at /subscribe/. Every sign-up gets an email with a link to confirm, and nothing is sent until they do (a sign-up never confirmed is deleted after 30 days). Admins can send the email again with Resend confirmation, on the Subscribers tab or the person’s page (at most 3 confirmation emails a day to one address).

People manage their subscription from the links at the bottom of every email: /email-preferences/ (which lists) and /unsubscribe/. Mail apps’ own one-click unsubscribe (Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail) works too, at once. A page with one of these addresses takes its place: put the Email preferences block on it.

On the Subscribers tab admins search and filter everyone (by status, list or tag), see each one’s consent (where, when, the wording, confirmed when), lists, emails and clicks, and can Add a contact, Import a CSV (email and name columns), Add members to a list, Unsubscribe, Erase and Export as CSV. Adding or importing asks how those people agreed to get your email. Anyone who unsubscribed, bounced, marked an email as spam or was erased is skipped: they have to sign up themselves. Erasing deletes a contact and keeps only a one-way hash of the address, so they’re never mailed again unless they sign up.

Tags, fields and segments

Each person has a first and last name, and can have tags (farm, vip, trade show 2026) and fields (town, business type), set on their page, given when adding them, or taken from an import: a tags column (separated by ; or |), and any other column becomes a field.

Fields every contact can have are set under Settings > Mailing Lists > Subscriber fields: a name and a type (text, number, date, or a choice of options). Each shows on every contact’s page as its own input, fills from an import column of the same name (a value that doesn’t fit the type is left out), is offered in segments with its options, and is a merge tag (Town is {town}). A Subscribe block can ask for first and last name and any of these fields, and tag the people who sign up through it; a form only fills them in for someone new or not yet confirmed.

A segment (the Segments tab) picks some of the people on a campaign’s lists, members or not. Its rules, all or any of which must match, can each be turned round:

• on a list;
• tagged (any of some tags);
• a field filled in, equal to or containing a value;
• a member (of some levels), while Members is on;
• signed up, opened an email or clicked a link in the last so many days (clicks by people, not mail scanners);
• signed up from a page, form or import.

Its page shows who matches now, with a count. Choose a segment on a campaign or digest: it then goes to the people on its lists who match. A segment that a campaign or digest uses can’t be deleted.

Campaigns

New campaign on the Campaigns tab opens its editor:

• name, subject, sender and reply-to (empty: the settings’), the lists, and with Members on, everyone, only members (of some levels) or only non-members;
• the email, designed in the email builder: text, images, buttons, sections and columns, the Entries block (the site’s latest posts or other entries, of some categories or tags) and, with Events on, the Events block. Merge tags: {first_name}, {last_name}, {name}, your subscriber fields ({town}), {email}, {site_name}, {unsubscribe_url}, {preferences_url}; a fallback for an empty value after a bar, {first_name|there}. Every email ends with a footer you can’t remove: why they get it, your name and postal address, and unsubscribe and preferences links. The site checks it is there before every send and test, and sends nothing without it;
• Send a test, to you and up to 5 more addresses, marked [Test].

Editors write and test campaigns; admins Send now or Schedule (in the site’s time zone), after a confirmation that shows how many people it goes to, and can Pause, Resume and Cancel. Whoever is still subscribed when each batch goes out gets it.

Once it has gone out, the campaign shows its numbers: delivered, bounces, spam complaints, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and each link’s clicks, and its Recipients: everyone it went to, filtered by delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, marked as spam, unsubscribed or not sent.

Clicks: people and machines

Mail security scanners (Microsoft’s, Proofpoint, Mimecast, Barracuda…) follow every link in an email seconds after it arrives, so raw click counts overstate interest. With link tracking on, each link goes through the site, which records the click and sends the visitor on, and judges each click:

• machine: a scanner’s address or browser name, a check that doesn’t load the page, a hidden link in the email that only machines follow (and clicks just around it), three different links within seconds, or a click seconds after delivery with no sign of a person after;
• confirmed person: they went on to use the page the link led to (links to your own site);
• likely a person: the rest.

Clicked counts people (confirmed and likely), not machines; Show machine clicks adds those to the links table. Opens leave out scanners and privacy proxies (Apple Mail’s opens every email), and are only indicative. Each contact’s page lists their clicks with the verdict and why.

Weekly digest

New digest on the Weekly digests tab makes a digest: a day and time, the lists, a subject ({week_of} is the Monday of the week) and an email. It starts with an Entries block set to only those new since the last issue and, with Events on, an Events block of what’s coming up.

Each week at its time the site makes that week’s issue, filled in with what’s new, as a campaign:

• Waits for an admin’s approval (default): the admins are emailed; it goes out after the hours you choose if an admin approves it, and is cancelled if not.
• Goes out on its own.

A week with fewer entries and events than you choose is skipped. Send me this week’s issue sends a test of it as it would be now; Make an issue now makes one outside its schedule. Editors set up a digest; an admin turns it on.

Members

With Members on, see Members and Mailing.