Hello darkness, my new friend.

We’ve given Buttondown a few new coats of paint CSS this month. First up, the new home screen. It’s a quick recap of your newsletter: What's new, what's important, and what needs your attention. You can write a new email, pick up where you last left off, and finish any remaining account setup tasks, if needed. 

Then we hid an easter egg in the Help menu: A long-requested Dark Mode. Choose between dark and light mode, or let Buttondown switch based on your system settings. It lets me write on Buttondown without blinding my daughter at night, and might keep you from needing sunglasses while drafting your next newsletter.

And since design is how it works, we’ve also redesigned our email editor. Goodbye bottom tray; hello revamped top right corner. Autosave vestigialized the Save button, so we sent it gently into the dark night.

You’ll now Publish your emails to your list and archive (replacing our old Save button), and can switch between Fancy, Markdown, and Naked editor modes from the “...” menu. Pairs nicely with darkness.

None shall pass!

A steady diet of spam, spam, spam, legit email, and spam gets old after a while. So after launching The Firewall in April, we’ve kept up the fight to keep out spammers from the ranks of your subscribers. The Firewall now scores emails based on other emails with the same IP address, watches for more problematic domains, and uses string-based checks to weed out email addresses that are most likely to be spam.

All that, to keep your deliverability high and your list as clean as possible.

From the blog

Did you know that every Hotmail email almost ended with the tagline “PS: I love you?”

Email signatures are a strange beast, morphing from a paper letter’s overly formal “I do remain sincerely yours” to being the most sought after bit of advertising space where everything from Hotmail to your iPhone want to advertise their offerings.

Here’s a brief history of email signatures (and a reminder that there’s no harm in having a bit of fun with yours).

Other stuff

• The editor wasn’t the only part of Buttondown that got redesigned. We also added deep links to our API requests dashboard so you jump to the related email or subscriber in your Buttondown account.

• Did Buttondown’s API send you a cryptic error code? Don’t just guess at what it means—check our new API error codes reference to figure out what makes an email_invalid.

• Ever wondered what the hell a webmention is? Do we have the guide for you.

• AT&T just joined Verizon and T-Mobile in sunsetting their email-to-SMS tools. Here’s how to build a DIY email-to-SMS gateway insead.

• Is your newsletter a newsletter-shaped-blog, or a blog-shaped-newsletter?