How I Built My Own Newsletter Setup (And Why)

I had a newsletter on this blog for years, but I didn’t send a single email for a long time. This is the story of how I finally got it back up and running, and what I learned along the way. The Tinyletter Years The old Tinyletter landing page, now a sad 404. Source: Wayback Machine For years my setup was a small form on the website pointing at Tinyletter, a small newsletter service that was focused on writers. What I liked about it was the simplicity. I never had to think about email deliverability, bounce rates, suppression lists, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, or any of that. I wrote a thing, hit send, people got it. The Tinyletter compose page, showing the simplicity of the interface. It just worked. Then Tinyletter shut down. A bit of history: Tinyletter was built in 2010 by Philip Kaplan, reportedly coded on a single Sunday, the 31st of October, 2010. It got acquired by Mailchimp one year later, and quietly became the de facto home for writers who wanted a personal newsletter without thinking…