Manage and import newsletter subscribers

Only team admins can open Subscribers, because it shows email addresses. The status tabs are Active (confirmed, and getting email), Unconfirmed (asked to join but never opened the confirmation link), Unsubscribed, Removed by an admin, and Suppressed after a hard bounce or a spam complaint. Each row shows the subscriber, where they Came from (the signup page, an import, Store checkout, a webinar or a course enrolment), their status and when they joined.

Search by email or name. A long list shows only its 500 most recent matches and says so; search to narrow it, or choose Export CSV for the whole list.

Remove stops future email from this newsletter to that address; it does not erase what was already sent.

Import a list

Under Import a list, choose a Subscriber file up to 5 MB (a Substack export, a CSV, TSV or pipe-delimited file), or paste addresses one per line, or both. Say Where the list came from and How these people agreed to receive it, which are kept as a record and not shown to subscribers, then tick that the list was not bought, scraped, borrowed, or built from your contacts, and choose Import subscribers. The file is read once for the import and is not kept.

Imported addresses become active without confirming, which is why the permission is recorded. An import is not permission to email a purchased, scraped, or unrelated list.

The importer leaves out malformed addresses, duplicates, existing subscribers, rows whose status column says they unsubscribed, bounced or were removed (as an export from another service such as Mailchimp marks them), and addresses suppressed after a hard bounce or spam complaint.

Unsubscribing and suppression

Every email has an unsubscribe link. It opens a page that asks the subscriber to confirm, and they will not get the newsletter again; anything already sent may still arrive. To subscribe again, they use the signup page.

A hard bounce or spam complaint suppresses the address across team newsletters, so another import cannot add it back.

In the native app

Open Newsletter, then Subscribers, to search, filter and remove subscribers in Personal or the selected team. The subscriber actions menu shares the full CSV export, and Import subscribers adds a list from a file or pasted addresses with the same permission questions.

If an expected row is left out, check its address, its status in the source file, whether it is already a subscriber, and its consent before retrying. For a suppression that the address owner believes is incorrect, Contact support.