Newsletters

Where: Newsletters → + New newsletter

A newsletter is a recurring email: a monthly round-up, a members' bulletin, whatever you send. PostYard collects the content, writes the introduction and section blurbs, shows you the finished email, and only sends it once you have approved it. There is no way to make it send without approval.

HubSpot supplies the list of recipients and nothing else — PostYard composes and sends every email itself, so you do not need HubSpot Marketing Email.

Three things, and you control the mix on the Template tab:

1. 1Articles from your website, published since the last issue.
2. 2Events coming up, in date order.
3. 3Anything the team has added by hand or by tagging @postyard in Slack — these wait in the Items tab until the next issue is drafted.

Nothing in a newsletter is invented. The articles, events and items are real records; the only thing written for you is the linking prose — the introduction and the section blurbs. If that cannot be written (no AI key, or the call fails), the issue is still drafted with the template's own placeholder text and tells you so at the top.

Where: Newsletters → (open one) → Template

The email is built from sections stacked down the page, each holding one, two or three columns. Pick a section or a block on the left, edit it in the middle, and the preview on the right updates as you type — it is rendered by exactly the code that renders the real email, so what you see is what your recipients get.

Text boxes take a small amount of formatting and nothing else: **bold**, [label](https://…) for a link, and a line starting "- " for a bullet. Anything else is shown to the reader literally.

Reducing a section from three columns to one does not delete anything — the blocks from the columns you removed are merged into the one that is left.

Where: Newsletters → (open one) → Issues → (open an issue)

An issue is drafted a few days before it is due — you choose how many on the Settings tab. You get a Slack card and, if you have asked for it, an email. Open the issue and you can send yourself a test copy, re-fetch the articles and events, edit any of the copy, and then approve it with a send time.

Approving stores exactly the email you just read. If anything about the issue changes afterwards, the send stops rather than going out with something nobody reviewed — you will see a message saying so, and re-approving fixes it.

An issue nobody has approved is never sent, even once its send time has passed. You get a reminder instead, and the issue stays a draft.

Where: Newsletters → (open one) → Settings → Who sends it

There are two ways the email can leave. By default PostYard sends it itself, through this site's mail setup, one message per person. The alternative is to have HubSpot send it: PostYard still writes the issue, freezes it and waits for your approval, and then hands the finished email to HubSpot, which does the posting.

The reason to switch is usually deliverability. Most companies have already set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for their bulk email provider rather than for their office mailbox, and sending a few hundred copies through the office mailbox also fills its Sent Items and eats its allowance. Sending through HubSpot avoids both.

One-off setup, and it has to be done by hand because HubSpot's API cannot create a template: in HubSpot go to Marketing → Files and Templates → Design Manager, create a coded email template, paste in the source PostYard shows you on the Delivery panel, publish it, and copy its path back into PostYard.

When you approve an issue on this route, PostYard creates the email in HubSpot as a DRAFT, aimed at your list, and gives you a link to it. Somebody opens it in HubSpot and presses Send. PostYard can press Send for you, but only on HubSpot's Enterprise plan — on anything else you get the draft, which is the safer arrangement anyway.

Two things work differently on this route, and both are said on screen rather than left to be discovered. HubSpot measures the opens and clicks, so the issue page shows HubSpot's figures and there is no per-person timeline or top-links table. And HubSpot decides who is suppressed — so if someone unsubscribed through PostYard, turn on "Mirror unsubscribes to HubSpot" or they will get the next issue.

If your HubSpot plan will not allow any of this, the Download for HubSpot button on any approved issue always works: it gives you the finished email with HubSpot's own personalisation and unsubscribe tokens already in it, ready to paste into a HubSpot email by hand.

PostYard starts in dry-run: it does all the work, logs every recipient, and emails nobody. There is also a redirect mode that sends every copy to one inbox of yours, tagged with who it was really for. Both are the same two switches the member-email send uses, under Settings → HubSpot — one setting, not two, so you cannot turn one off and believe you turned both off.

The badge at the top of every newsletter screen tells you which mode you are in, and an approval in Slack says it out loud too.

Every email carries an unsubscribe link and the header that makes Gmail and Outlook show their own one-click unsubscribe button. That matters: if someone cannot find a way out easily, the way they take is "mark as spam", which damages your sending reputation for everyone else on the list.

An unsubscribe is recorded by PostYard itself and takes effect immediately — including part-way through a send that is already going out. Optionally it is also mirrored into HubSpot, which needs an extra permission on your HubSpot token; PostYard's own list is what actually stops the email either way.

Where: Newsletters → (open one) → Issues → (open a sent issue)

Once an issue has gone out, its page shows how it did. The tiles mean exactly this:

1. 1Sent — how many emails were actually sent.
2. 2Delivered — sent, minus the ones that bounced. This is the number the percentages are worked out against, because someone whose address bounced never had the chance to open it.
3. 3Opened — how many different people loaded the email. See the caveat below; this number is an upper bound.
4. 4Clicked — how many different people clicked a link. This is the most trustworthy number on the page.
5. 5Click-to-open — of the people who opened it, how many clicked. A good measure of whether the content earned the click.
6. 6Unsubscribed and Bounced — counted from the unsubscribe list and from real delivery failures.

Open tracking works by putting an invisible image in the email and seeing who loads it. Apple Mail loads that image for every message it receives, whether or not anybody reads it — so on a list with a lot of Apple users the open rate is inflated and there is no honest way to correct for it. That is why the click rate and the click-to-open rate are the two figures worth watching over time.

Security scanners and link checkers also fetch every image and follow every link before a person sees the email. Those are recognised and left out of the totals; the page says how many were excluded.

Only a live send is measured. A dry run or a redirected send shows its tiles greyed out, because nobody on the list received it — a row of zeros would read as "nobody opened it", which is a different and much worse thing.

Nothing is ever decided automatically from an open or a click. Nobody is removed, re-sent to or re-timed on the strength of these numbers. The one exception is a genuine delivery failure: an address that hard-bounces once, or soft-bounces three times, stops receiving — a receiving server stating that an address does not work is a fact, not a guess.

You can switch open and click measurement off per newsletter on its Settings tab. The setting applies to the next issue you approve — an issue already approved keeps whatever it was approved with, because the email stored at approval is the email that gets sent.

What is stored: which recipient opened or clicked, when, the browser or mail client they used, and a one-way scrambled form of their network address (never the address itself). All of it is deleted after twelve months. If someone asks you to erase their data, tell your administrator — there is a tool for it.

Tag @postyard and ask it to add something to the newsletter — a link, a note, a file. It is held for the NEXT issue and nothing is sent; the reply tells you which newsletter it went to, when that issue goes out, and how many items are waiting.

This works on a paused newsletter too. Pausing stops new issues being drafted, not things being collected — items keep piling up in the Items tab and go into the first issue drafted after someone sets the newsletter back to Active. The reply says the newsletter is paused rather than quoting a send date that is not coming.