Block AI from reading your archives

You work tirelessly to carefully compose and craft emails meant for real flesh-and-blood human subscribers and what does AI do? Swallows it up and vomits it back out with a LLM-spun interpretation and, if you’re lucky, some form of attribution.

Unless Buttondown hosts your newsletter archives and you turn off crawl access, that is!

We’ve made it so you can tell search engines, AI crawlers, and an assortment of other web scrapers not to index your content. Or maybe you’re more of an “all press is good press” sender: That’s fine too. Go to your newsletter’s Settings page, click the Manage button next to Archives, and scroll down to the section on Crawling to customize your settings.

It’s a robots.txt for your archives, with a few FAQs and additional details in the changelog update if you’d like to know more about what is and isn’t blocked.

Better looking and more detailed analytics digests

We’ve shipped close to a dozen analytics updates over the past year and the latest changes comes to how Buttondown handles email digests of your newsletter’s performance. While it’s only the first iteration in an ongoing update to how we email you about your analytics, you should begin seeing more relevant, tailored reports. 

If you’re already receiving reports via email, you should start seeing these updates automatically. If you’re not currently getting them but would like to, go to your Notifications settings page under the Account dropdown on the left side of your dashboard. 

Reporting updates are largely based on interviews with current Buttondown users, so if there’s anything you’d like to see added, removed, or updated, email us at [email protected] and let us know!

From the blog

There are a lot of things that people seem to assume about email that have never been true. One is the incorrect assumption that email is free, which has rarely been the case. The protocol is free and you could technically send emails without paying a service or subsidizing an account with ads. But the reality, and another oft touted misnomer, is that email is decentralized, which isn’t all that true, at least today. Still, neither compromise has stopped your inbox from being one of the healthiest avenues to interact with people, and apps, online.

Email was how researchers requested and downloaded software in the 80s, thanks to Netlib. It’s how Japanese people sign up for events, thanks to Karamail. And it’s how millions of WordPress.com users create blog posts with nothing more than a message sent to their own account, as yet another example of email as a universal interface for software. You can even use it to build and maintain an offline community, like so many senders are doing with the increasingly popular snail mail clubs. Misunderstood or not, the world is better off because of email.

Other stuff

• Justin put together a behind-the-scenes technical write-up on deleting three of the largest tables in Buttondown’s database, making Buttondown faster for you in the process.

• Want to export not only an email’s overall performance but also a timestamped log of every interaction with said email? Now you can, with itemized event exports.

• On September 1st, there was a 20-minute window when certain users could not view their dashboard or archives because of changes to our database. We’ve made updates to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

• A particularly large send and an internal misconfiguration caused author dashboards and archives to slow down or become unresponsive for two hours on September 9th. Read the incident report for more details.