New in Labs: Email Subscriptions

Wonderful feature, thanks. I am still testing this too.

  • When I add an scheduled post I am not receiving an e-mail after the post has actually been published. Is this a known ‘bug’?

Are you doing a similar flow to what @digitalgyoza mentioned? That is, publishing an Anonymous post, changing the scheduled time, then moving it to a blog? Because it does look like there’s a bug right now where that flow won’t schedule the post to be emailed (fixing this today).

Yep! Since static / pinned pages are essentially the same as blog posts, you’ll be able to add a subscription box there, too. This is another reason for making it flexible like this: I was imagining people might create a “subscribe” page that just has some text and the subscription box.

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I am not sure about that, because I only recently discovered the perks of posting anonymous (being able to ‘preview’ and edit before it shows on my blog). I am quite sure these scheduled post were not anonymous, but not 100% sure… sorry. But, if the issue is fixed I trust it will work. If not, I will let you know.

Hi @matt - tested it again and the post I scheduled for today appears on my blog, but not in my e-mail. I created an anonymous post first, edited it, changed scheduled time and then moved it to blog. Hope this is of any help?

Ok, it seems to be a spam-issue with G-Mail - it marks the messages as spam, but not always, which is weird? (But hey, why be surprised?)
Anyway, I have taken care of it now and told the mighty AI to treat this mail nice. I hope it will all be good now.
If not, I will let you know, of course.

@matt - edit: no, still the same regarding scheduled posts:

  • anonymous post, changing schedule time, moved to blog: does not appear in my inbox.
  • copied the post-txt, pasted it into a new blog-post, published straight away: 15 mins later it appears in my inbox.

Hi @matt :wave:t2:

I’ve just signed up and immediately became a paid user just for this!
Made me incredibly happy to see this feature land in write.as :tada:

I’ve got one recommendation and one question.

:nerd_face:Recommendation :
Based on previous experience with other email subscription providers, if the initial confirmation email is sent using a different name than the blog’s name, people generally don’t confirm signing up to mailing lists.

Currently the confirmation email’s sender name is “Write.as Letters” instead of the blog’s own name, and this will leave many users confused about what’s going on, particularly with custom domain blogs. (Since the only write.as reference they’ll see if they’re attentive is going to be in the footer)

Ideally, it would be fantastic if you guys can use the blog’s own name in the sender-name field of the email, especially for custom domain blogs.

:thinking:Question :
Is the 500 subscribers limit a hard api limit? If not, can you increase it if I reach out to you with my username? I’ll be using write.as for my product’s announcements & news blog, and I have reasons to believe this quota will quickly fill up as soon as start pointing my users to the blog to follow product updates etc.

Many thanks for Write.as & the email subscription addition you’re are bringing. This is a fantastic service combination, and I hope branching out to multiple other mini-side/future-projects won’t slow you down / distract you from making write.as even better each and every day. :v:t2:

All the best,
John

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Hey @ozbay, that’s awesome to hear! :smile:

Great recommendation – I just changed it so the confirmation email now shows the name of the blog as the sender. Just note that for now it’ll still come from yourblog@writeasletters.com – we’re still working on full custom domain support.

That’s exciting that you’ll be using Write.as for your product news / announcements! The 500 subscriber limit is soft – no one will get cut off for going a little bit over it. But in the future, we’ll charge for having more subscribers than that, to cover our own costs, which go up with the amount of email we send out.

So if you want to be sure that you don’t hit any limits, I’d recommend upgrading to our Support tier. That’ll give you an essentially unlimited subscriber limit*, and we’ll pay special attention to your account to make sure your list growth goes smoothly. You’ll also get custom domain support on your emails when that’s available.

Thanks again for the input, and keep us in the loop with feedback as you keep trying everything out!

* As an early user of this feature, before we have a pricing model for >500 subscribers, I’m happy to keep the number of subscribers unlimited for anyone on the Support tier.

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Sorry for the delayed response – there is still an issue with posts not being emailed when following this flow: anonymous post -> move to blog. Working on a fix now.

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Okay, we’re back to work on subscriptions! Sorry for the delays, everyone.

Today we added support for a new shortcode:

<!--emailsub-->

Simply insert this text anywhere in your post to create an email subscription box. You can see it in action on this Subscribe page on my personal blog.

Looking to the future: again, once we have the option to add a post signature across all posts, you’ll be able to simply include this shortcode and show the box on every post.

Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts / input!

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YES this sounds perfect. We have a common footer we put on every elementary blog post, and just being able to drop that all in there would be ace.

This begs the question, are there other shortcodes available in write.as that aren’t documented? (also, can you please document this somewhere besides here in the forums?)

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Hi Matt, any news regarding the anonymous post issue? It is still there: even without changing the schedule time and only using anonymous as a draft and when done moving it straight to the blog.

Another thing that is still happening: Gmail marks posts as spam, but not always. Even when a previous post is marked as no-spam, it will happen to new posts to be marked as spam after a while. Is this a known issue?

Hi @egoecho, the anonymous post issue is being worked on. The spam issue is a known one as well. @matt could give you more details.

I opened up issues for both on the Github project page - one for the posts being marked as spam problem and the other for the anonymous post workflow. We will keep these updated as we work on them so feel free to follow them and contribute.

Thanks for keeping up with these!

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We just finalized the fixes for the anonymous post issue @egoecho. Let us know if the anonymous post workflow for email subscriptions is now working on your end.

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Cheers! Yes, tested it today and it works! Thanks so much :slight_smile:

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Regarding the spam-issue: Gmail still treats write.as-messages as spam. Even when I keep telling GM it is no spam (every single time). The reason why it is marked as spam, according to their standard ‘help’, is that the IP address write.as uses were/are known as spam-addresses (??). They also mention a solution, but all this is a bit too technical for me. But maybe this info points you in a helpful direction.

Hey @egoecho, previously our mail was coming from a shared IP address, which meant we could get roped in with other spammers on that server. Just this week we started switching to our own IP address, which should completely fix this after a bit of time (it’ll just take several days to get transferred over and get our mailing reputation established).

In the meantime, please be sure to keep marking messages as not-spam to help us out with this. Thanks for doing that, and for your patience as we roll this out!

Also, we just brought this feature out of Labs today! We’re continuing the conversation / discussing the announcement over on this thread: Write.as Letters

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That is very good news, thanks! I will sure keep on marking :wink: I was just reading the ‘out of Labs post’ - very happy with it, cheers!

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Hi, in the past few days posts seem to appear in spam folders again. At least (as far as I heard of and encountered myself) Gmail marks posts as spam. All worked so well since October. So, hopefully it is something that can be easily be fixed, would be great!