Updates from July
Filtering out all the noise
Subscribers contain multitudes. They’re subscribed or unsubscribed, they joined from your website or a signup form or from a referral, their email address is from Gmail or a company domain or Yahoo! (or, yup, even AOL and Juno. What is dead may never die).
This month, we’ve added filters for everything. You can now filter subscribers by domain, to keep CBS team members off your newsletter if you’re scared they’ll cancel your late show. Or you can filter by source, to send one welcome email to folks who signed up from your site, another to those who opted in when they purchased something from your store, another for those you manually added (you know, folks at studios you’re pitching for a new, post-CBS show).
That’s not all! We added a new risk score filter, to see subscribers who Buttondown’s Firewall automatically flagged based on their IP address, the history of their email address, and more. That makes it easy to bulk unsubscribe risky addresses and clean up your list—or to un-flag someone if you’re certain a friend has been unfairly flagged.
Along with that, instead of a single is_spammy flag on your subscribers with broken, flagged, or otherwise undeliverable email addresses, we’ve added more nuance into a new undeliverable status on your subscriber list. There, you can see everyone who can’t receive your emails, then drill down to see if they’re actually spammy or if their email is just broken.
And last but not least comes active paid subscription filters, to get a list of everyone currently paying you $5/month—not everyone who’s ever paid you $5/month (as our previous filters returned).
Pay what you want—but $x would be nice
Speaking of paid subscriptions, you know the suggested tips on checkout screens that save you from trying to calculate 25% before you’ve even had your coffee? We’ve brought the same idea to your Buttondown pay-what-you-what subscriptions.
Now, instead of simply relying on the generosity of your subscribers, you can nudge them in the direction of what you think is a fair price for your work. They can always go lower (or, you hope, higher!), but we’d bet they’ll be most likely to opt-in to what you suggest.
Here’s how to enable suggested pricing in your pay-what-you-want newsletter.
From the blog
Email subject lines already feel a bit vestigial (oh right, Updates from July, very creative). But at the dawn of email, some voted for emails that were nothing more than a subject line. Others wanted more. A lot more. Imagine email messages that included a reason for the message, number of spelling mistakes, the weather at the time the email was sent, and a psych evaluation of the sender (no, seriously: We almost couldn’t believe it either). The history of email subject lines is truly stranger than fiction.
As is the fact that, from 1991 to 1994, Brazil’s only internet connection was through Fermilab, the US Department of Energy lab in Illinois better known for accelerating particles than packets. Yet, through a few weird twists of history, if you sent any email to or from Brazil in the early ‘90’s, odds are your message was routed through the lab’s servers.
Other stuff
Ever wondered which email app a colleague used to message you? Wonder no longer, with our guide to the subtle art of email forensics.
Speaking of investigation, did you ever stop to notice how many software features came to life originally in email? Swipe-to-delete. Threads. The @ symbol’s modern meaning. Status updates. Markdown. Email’s fingerprints are everywhere you look.
Want to push data from Buttondown to other apps like Slack (and vice versa)? Here’s how, with a guide to Buttondown’s webhooks.
And if you’ve neglected your newsletter too long, we’ve got the tips you need to return from a newsletter hiatus in style (tl;dr: Own it).
Blimey that’s quite a lot of great new stuff!