Unfortunately, a lot of email clients ignore max-width. I try to get around this by setting the font-size to 20px. It’s not ideal but it’s the best I could come up with. I don’t know whether it works in Gmail, though.
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With the end of the month approaching, I am starting to look at my newsletter. I like this solution. I think that I was thinking of a way that would work within email clients, but I have learnt through these pages of the lack of standards within such clients, so this is another way…and more importantly client independent!
HTML in email clients is a nightmare. I spent the better part of a decade building HTML that rendered somewhat consistently in various clients. It’s as bad as CSS was back in the late 90s.
To that end, I would really try to keep the email templates as simple and decoration free as possible. It’s the only way to make them work the best for the most people.
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@Manton, I am late to the party having just discovered this feature by accident. I wanted to say though that I think it is fantastic. Email is something everyone uses and making content available via Email, without requiring the blogger to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it happen is a definite win IMO.
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I’m eagerly awaiting email templates to have something a little bit cleaner.
Hi, @manton! I don’t know where to put feature requests, so please move this if there’s a better place for it.
My number one feature request with newsletters is to set a permanent “wrapping” around the posts – an intro paragraph at the top, at the least, and optimally a “thanks for reading, here’s how to contact me” at the end.
I know that I can do this manually, and I have done so in the past, but I cannot reliably get to a computer in the 3-hour morning window between the preview and the sending of the message.
The result is that some of my newsletters look and feel better than others, and that’s an inconsistent experience for readers.
Another option would be to allow us to schedule the time of day, but I understand that would add another level of complexity for you. It seems easiest to allow us to edit and save a persistent block of introductory text on the newsletter settings page.
Thanks for considering.
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Yes, I think that’s a great suggestion. Originally I wanted to make all of the templates used for newsletters editable, but that’s a bigger change, so I think for now just adding a couple text boxes in the newsletter settings is the way to go. I’ll work on that.
(There was a similar suggestion recently for intro paragraphs for the welcome email someone gets when subscribing. Possibly we could do both of these at the same time.)
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I was considering upgrading my subscription to do newsletters. Reading this it seems like there isn’t a good way to filter posts. I have one to two posts per week that I would feel good sending into someone’s inbox. The remainder of the posts are short posts or links that aren’t intended for an inbox. Am I understanding the features correctly?
I think you understand it correctly. If you want to send monthly newsletters, Micro.blog can gather up the posts from a specific blog category. That way you just add posts you want to email to that category and Micro.blog handles the rest.
For weekly newsletters, we haven’t added the category option yet. It is planned.
Is there a timeline on the weekly newsletter category option? That seems like it could work well for my purposes.
EDIT: full disclosure, I’m trying to get the newsletter going the first week in June. If that’s on the near roadmap, I might wait. If it’s not I might find another solution and changeover later.
Yes, I took another look at this today and I think launching it by June is possible. The plumbing is mostly there to support it. If for some reason we can’t get the user interface updated next week, send an email to help@micro.blog with the category you plan to use for your newsletter and I can manually wire it up for your account, and then you’ll be able to edit it later.
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Cool. Upgraded to Premium. I’ll wait for the announcement and email you otherwise! Thanks! I love microblog and all the work you all do.
Is the subscriber list exportable? What format? Does the subscriber need to have an MB account?
Yes, the email list is exportable in a CSV format. Just a simple list of email addresses for subscribers.
No need for any subscribers to have a Micro.blog account. For subscribers, it just feels like subscribing to any email newsletter, and they shouldn’t even know where the blog is hosted unless they pay close attention to the subscription confirming email link.
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As they stand, MB newsletters aren’t quite flexible enough for my personal needs… for those with a microblog and in the same boat, which newsletter service are you using?
I’d need to import subscribers, and looking to just send simple newsletters with words & links (no bells-n-whistles, detailed stats, etc necessary).
I use the free tier of Buttondown to send a monthly newsletter to around 80 subscribers (at the moment). A newsletter I used to do had a couple of hundred subscribers. I’m a very happy user of Buttondown.
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Thanks, @Miraz. I know Buttondown is a popular option here, and I just checked it out. Unfortunately I have over 1,000 subscribers, so I’d be having to pay $29/month. I’m wondering if there’s a free/less expensive option like TinyLetter.com that I’m not aware of 
Ah yes. Completely understand. 
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