"Send to Subscribers" Option for email

As I understand it, the Subscription feature will send an email upon a post being published. I do not want to send all posts, just select ones.

I suggest adding an “email to subscribers” button/link/option for a post so that the defeault is that the post does NOT send and that you have to actually trigger it.

Thoughts?

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Thanks for the input @justinf! I’ve changed this to a #feedback:feature-requests thread so everyone can vote on it.

To help me understand a bit more how this feature would help you, can you describe: how you imagine using your blog / newsletter, what kinds of things you’re posting vs. sending via email, etc.?

The blogging platform I use currently has this feature, and it’s nice to be able to pick-and-choose when (or if) a post should go out.

  1. Sometimes you want to publish, be sure all is in order (possibly make a change), and then when you’re ready… send the post to subscribers.

  2. Not all posts need to be sent. On my blog, I write some personal posts… but then sometimes I write something related to business and I know folks would find that more enjoyable to read. That allows me to send the ones they’d be interested in. This also allows for “round-up” posts to be sent once a week that perhaps contains links to the other posts.

PS: Sorry for miscategorizing – still learning the ropes of the forum!

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I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten used to being able to do this, too.

However, I’ve realised that the current simplicity of Write.As might be a refreshing “back to basics”.

A workaround might be to publish your blog as a newsletter that you’ll send out, and then make tweaks afterwards by ‘editing’ the published piece. For example, I like to write “from, Jas” to sign-off from my posts, but then would delete this afterwards. I’ve been doing this with my existing Ghost blog, which also serves as an all-in-one blog and newsletter.

Honestly, I think long-term I would much rather have an all-in-one blog/newsletter to keep things steamlined/minimal, so Write.As’s functionality could be a blessing in disguise for me.

@matt: could I delete this “from Jas” line straightaway, or would I have to wait? I read on another thread that there’s a 15-minute lag on hitting ‘publish’ and emails sending.

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@matt – would this be a viable workaround?

Temporarily turn off subscriptions for my blog > publish blog post (wait 1hr) > turn subscriptions back on.

My understanding is that the email won’t be sent out to subscribers if that feature is turned off for a moment.

If the content in the linked post below is still accurate, you can use it as a workaround to avoid sending emails on certain posts. Publish the post as an anonymous post. Wait 20 minutes, then move the anonymous post into your blog/site.

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^ @matt if you could confirm that this (still) works, that would be awesome.

That’s correct – if the feature is turned off while publishing a post, the email won’t be queued up at all. (Not sure off the top of my head what would happen if you publish then disable the feature; my guess is the email will still go out.)

That’s correct, that would work! Another way would be to publish the post, then immediately update its published date to 21 or more (to be safe) minutes in the past. As long as you update that within the 15-minute sending window, you’d be safe.

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this is really handy to know, thank you!

Hi everyone, there is a longer discussion on use cases for not sending every post as an email on the original feature announcement thread.

My own use case is that if I have a personal/general blog on write.as (which I’m considering moving to from the current provieder), then really anything and everything goes there, both topic wise and content length wise. It’s not a good idea to blast emails to subscribers for each new post. A checkbox like “Don’t send as newsletter” or otherwise for each post, just like Substack and Ghost offer, would be perfect.

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