Write.as Letters

We are happy to announce that we are moving email subscriptions out of labs and into our core product as Write.as Letters! Thanks for all your continued feedback and support with improving this feature. We hope it serves as a minimal, principled alternative for running a newsletter.

Check out the official announcement and feel free to continue the discussion here with additional feedback, questions, and comments.

10 Likes

Hi!

I think I have seen this suggestion somewhere else in these forums, but I wanted to follow up here since it’s relevant to Letters.

It would be nice to have the option of preventing certain posts from being delivered in the newsletter.

This could be useful if, for example, we are making a tags page, search page, or anything that is more “functional” rather than a proper post we want our users to read.

I think most subscribers would find it annoying to get emails like “here is a tag page”, etc… :slight_smile:

7 Likes

That is a fantastic point @Melyanna, especially for pinned posts. I wonder if a short code like <!--noemail--> could do the trick. We could also just have backend logic that says no pinned posts gets delivered in the newsletter.

Any further suggestions would be great!

3 Likes

Both options are good though have pros and cons:

  1. <!--noemail--> is good because this way each author is free to decide which post gets delivered and which doesn’t. But on the other hand is something that needs to be added manually, so easy to forget.

  2. no pinned posts in the newsletter is automatic, so great as it does not require any manual action, but doesn’t give the author freedom to decide.

Personally I think I’d like option 1 better, though hopefully it doesn’t overcomplicate things.

3 Likes

I agree that giving people more freedom would be best. The markup would just have to be made apparent in documentation and elsewhere, otherwise people will miss out on it.

We’ll look further into it and let everyone know if we make any additional changes. But again, thanks for the great feedback @Melyanna!

5 Likes

Thank you for this feature. Can we provide one URL/link to anyone where they will see only the subscription form to my blog/newsletter?

Hi @kushaldas! You certainly can create a “Subscribe” post for your blog/newsletter similar to what @matt has here.

Just add the <!--emailsub--> markup which creates the subscription form in a post. Once published, you can pin the post as a static page(follow the guide here for help). Then just provide the link of that post for anyone who wants to subscribe.

2 Likes

Thank you for the help.

Of course! And please feel free to reach out on the forum if you have more questions, feedback, or feature requests. We’d be glad to hear it!

What is the maximum number of subscribers? Will you need to charge more for Write.as Pro above a certain threshold? For example, Revue charges according to the number of subscribers.

500 is the subscriber limit but it is a soft limit – no one will get cut off for going a little bit over it. In the future we’ll charge for having more than 500 subscribers to cover our own costs, but we’ll be sure to let everyone know far in advance to when that pricing is instated.

1 Like

500 subscribers across all of our blogs under the single Pro account, right?

Sounds reasonable to me.

Please kindly decide the pricing for more than 500 at your earliest convenience because I need to plan for the future.

Yes you are correct - 500 subscribers across all blogs for one account. And we’ll definitely let everyone know as soon as pricing is finalized!

1 Like

I am here to say that I would appreciate having a <!--noemail--> shortcode opotion.

1 Like

Thanks @bodyofwater! I am liking the <!--noemail-- shortcode the more I think about it.

@Melyanna, to respond to your concern about the shortcode being easy to forget, we could remind the user when they enable email subscriptions with a little note about the shortcode. I imagine something like this could work:

We could then talk about it in the how-to guide. The more places it can be seen the more easily it can be reinforced!

1 Like

Where do replies to email-newsletters go to?

Hi! I couldn’t find anyone already asking this on here but may just be missing it.

My mum had asked me if we’d been receiving her replies to our subscription e-mail updates, saying that she’s been giving her thoughts and feedback on our posts. I hadn’t thought about that, and felt bad that her thoughtful responses had been apparently lost in the void over the months! So yeah-- is there a way to receive replies to letters, or is that just not a thing?

Thanks!

3 Likes

Hi @kateromain! So the email address newsletters send from, yourblog@writeasletters.com, is just the address posts are sent from. Emails sent to them don’t go anywhere, so the replies your mum sent cannot be received.

But I’d like to give you some optimism — your mum’s responses are probably not completely lost. They could still be in her email client’s “Sent” folder, so I’d personally recommend telling her to go to that folder, find the emails to the hummingcrow@writeasletters.com (or whatever it is) address and to forward those responses to your personal email address.

Sorry about the inconvenience there! Hope you can still get to see her thoughtful responses.

Thanks @cjeller1592!

Good to know. And thanks-- I did mention to her that she could fwd the sent mail :slight_smile:

I suppose it might be good to include something about that in the posts we send to e-mail, like “if you wish to share your thoughts on this or any of our posts, feel free to reach us at ______.”

Best,
Kate

1 Like

Can I add this as a feature request? Would be great to have family and friends receiving my newsletter to be able to reply directly to the email. Especially since we don’t have a comment feature yet. (Is that still under construction?

1 Like

Has the <!--noemail--> feature been implemented yet? Or does someone have a workaround for this? I like to edit my posts quite a bit before I settle on a finished version, as well as the general nature of pinned posts that are not meant to reach subscribers.

2 Likes