Send archived emails to new subscribers

I’m getting tired of starting off all of these feature announcements with some variation of “this might have been the single most frequently requested feature of the past twenty-four months”, but… this might be the single most frequently requested feature of the past twenty-four months [^1]: you can now send previous emails to subscribers in your Subscribers page.

First, though, a bit of background: Buttondown’s subscriber-email relationship has always been intentionally spartan. There are no clever knobs or automation sequences; I’ve intentionally optimized for ease of onboarding and conceptual simplicity over featureness, meaning that all you can really do with an email after sending it is set it to be your ‘welcome email’ that greets new subscribers or use it as scaffolding to build a new email.

Folks have wanted the ability to send arbitrary emails again to new subscribers for a long time, and the reasons they gave have grown extensive:

1. One author wanted to be able to share an email from the day before with a slew of new subscribers who had joined right after an old email went viral;
2. One author wanted to be able to have a “pre-canned” email for folks with a certain tag to direct them towards other interesting posts that would be relevant to their interests;
3. One author wanted to be able to resend an email a few times to their subscribers in order to remind them of an upcoming event.

And now, you can! Head on over to the Subscribers page, select a few subscribers (or just one), and click the Send archived email button as seen below — you’ll be prompted with your full list of emails to send to folks.

There are a couple caveats with this feature:

• You can only resend an email to a subscriber once, so as to avoid spamming (intentional and unintentional!)
• You can’t send emails to folks who would otherwise not be eligible to receive them (unsubscribed folks, emails that were marked as spammy, and so on).
• Buttondown will intentionally not prevent you from sending a premium-only email to free subscribers (or any combination therein.)

But beyond that, the world is your newsletter-y oyster! Please let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see: as always, I love getting emails.

[^1]: Modulo the ones that I had already implemented, that is.