Gate your content behind a (free) subscription

Requiring a paid subscription to view your archives was one of Buttondown’s earliest features. Now, you can require a subscription—paid or unpaid alike—to read your archives. It’s a way to drive more subscriptions from your most popular newsletter issues.

As long as you’re using Fancy mode in the editor, type /subscriber wall in the body of your email and everything that sits below it will be hidden by a signup form (like the one above)!

For info on how subscriber walls work with RSS or how to create subscriber-only archives via API, check out our blog post about it.

New ways to deal with spammers and user agents

Three new settings made their way to the firewall earlier this month. The first two, Attack mode and Embedded fingerprinting, both deal with sudden and suspicious tsunamis of signups. You can turn them off if you like to live dangerously but you really shouldn’t. Seriously.

The third addition only applies to those of you using a custom hosting domain. If you’re one of them, you can now create a custom blocklist for user agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and facebookexternalhit, to keep your newsletters for human eyes only.

Head to your Firewall page to customize your settings or read the changelog entry to learn more about the specifics.

From the blog

Got too many emails in your inbox? So does almost everyone, going back to the dawn of computing!

It turns out that complaints about overstuffed and busy inboxes go back to the 1950s, two decades before email was even invented.

And even after email was out in the wild, we couldn’t agree on how to make it work, with the X.400 standard proposing a bunch of advanced features that could have made email 400x better. Except for the tiny detail that no one wanted to support it.

Did you know that the infamous “Red Telephone” between Washington and Moscow was both not a telephone and actually powered by email? That, and more, feature in our complicated history of government and email, complete with diplomatic backchannels, White House coverups, and congressional gatekeeping.

But your emails and newsletters, they should be the exact opposite of government email. Here’s how to write friendly, personal newsletters, from the desk of a business owner (complete with examples from John Deere’s paper newsletter, in 1837).

Other stuff

• Sending has been simplified. All of your outgoing emails now come from your username at buttondown.email or from your custom domain, if you have one.

• Three previously free features are becoming paid features: Metadata, transactional emails, and integrations. But if you were a user before April 20, congratulations! You’re a grandparent and these changes don’t affect you.

• We had two downtime events on March 31 and we made changes to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. You can read about them in our public postmortem.