Newsletter

Collect subscribers on a public signup page, import an existing list, and manage who gets each email.

Each newsletter has a public signup page where people subscribe with their email address, without a Magpie account, and confirm by email. A list from Substack, Mailchimp or another service can be imported with a record of how its people agreed. Team admins see every address, its status and where it came from, and can export the whole list.

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The signup page

The newsletter's public address is its signup page: the newsletter's name and description, the team that publishes it, and a box for an email address. The Newsletter page shows the address to copy and share.

Double opt-in
A submitted address will get one email asking to confirm. It becomes an active subscriber only after the person opens the link and chooses Yes, subscribe me, so an address cannot be subscribed by someone else typing it or by a link scanner opening the email.
One reply for every address
The page answers the same way whether or not an address is already on the list, so it does not reveal who subscribes. Repeated requests from one connection are limited.
New signups and Paused
Turning New signups off keeps the page but stops it taking addresses. Paused hides the public pages and holds any email waiting to go out. Neither removes a subscriber.
Address
Team admins can change the address in Settings. Links already shared, including those in sent email, will stop working.
A QR code
QR Codes can point a printed code at the signup page.

Buyers from the Store

A Store can show an unticked box at checkout: Email me news and offers from, followed by the Store's name. A buyer who ticks it will be added to the team's Newsletter as an active subscriber when the order is paid, with Store checkout as the source and no confirmation email. An address that unsubscribed, was removed or bounced will not be added again.

Import a list

Under Import a list on Subscribers, a team admin adds a file, pasted addresses one per line, or both. The file can be a Substack export, or a CSV, TSV or pipe-delimited file, of up to 5 MB. Magpie finds the email column, and a name column when the file has one. The file is read once for the import and is not kept.

  1. Say where it came from

    Where the list came from and How these people agreed to receive it are kept as a record of the import. Subscribers do not see them.

  2. Confirm the list was given

    Tick that the list was not bought, scraped, borrowed or built from your contacts. Imported addresses become active without a confirmation email, which is why the permission is recorded.

  3. What is left out

    Malformed addresses, duplicates, people already on the list, rows whose status column says they unsubscribed, bounced or were removed (as a Mailchimp export marks them), and addresses suppressed after a bounce or spam complaint.

  4. All or nothing

    If the import would take the list past the plan's subscriber limit, nothing is imported.

The subscriber list

Only team admins can open Subscribers, because it shows email addresses. Each row shows the subscriber, where they came from (Signup page, Import or Store checkout), their status and when they joined, and tabs filter the list by status. Search finds an address or a name; a long list shows its 500 most recent matches and says so.

Active
Confirmed, and getting email.
Unconfirmed
Asked to join on the signup page and has not opened the confirmation link.
Unsubscribed
Used the unsubscribe link in an email.
Removed
Taken off the list by an admin with Remove. Email already sent is not affected.
Suppressed
The address bounced permanently, or its owner reported an email as spam.

Unsubscribes, bounces and spam complaints

The unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email opens a page that asks the subscriber to confirm, and mail programs with their own Unsubscribe button unsubscribe in one step. From then on the newsletter will not be sent to them, and their copy of an email still waiting to go out will be skipped.

When an address bounces permanently, or its owner reports an email as spam, it is suppressed on every Magpie newsletter. A suppressed address will not be accepted by a signup page, an import or a Store checkout.

Export and the subscriber limit

Export CSV downloads every subscriber, whatever their status, with their name, status and source, and when they asked, confirmed, unsubscribed, were removed and were last sent an email.

Plans set how many subscribers a newsletter can have, counting active and unconfirmed addresses; unsubscribed, removed and suppressed ones do not count. Pro and the Team plan raise the limit. When the list is full, the signup page and Store checkout will add nobody new.

Start a subscriber list.

Create a Magpie account, start a newsletter from Newsletter, then share its signup page or import your list.

Create account