Newsletters

Where: Newsletters → + New newsletter

A newsletter is a recurring email: a monthly round-up, a members' bulletin, whatever you send. PostYard collects the content, writes the introduction and section blurbs, shows you the finished email, and only sends it once you have approved it. There is no way to make it send without approval.

HubSpot supplies the list of recipients and nothing else — PostYard composes and sends every email itself, so you do not need HubSpot Marketing Email.

Three things, and you control the mix on the Template tab:

1. 1Articles from your website, published since the last issue.
2. 2Events coming up, in date order.
3. 3Anything the team has added by hand or by tagging @postyard in Slack — these wait in the Items tab until the next issue is drafted.

Nothing in a newsletter is invented. The articles, events and items are real records; the only thing written for you is the linking prose — the introduction and the section blurbs. If that cannot be written (no AI key, or the call fails), the issue is still drafted with the template's own placeholder text and tells you so at the top.

Where: Newsletters → (open one) → Template

The email is built from sections stacked down the page, each holding one, two or three columns. Pick a section or a block on the left, edit it in the middle, and the preview on the right updates as you type — it is rendered by exactly the code that renders the real email, so what you see is what your recipients get.

Text boxes take a small amount of formatting and nothing else: **bold**, [label](https://…) for a link, and a line starting "- " for a bullet. Anything else is shown to the reader literally.

Reducing a section from three columns to one does not delete anything — the blocks from the columns you removed are merged into the one that is left.

Where: Newsletters → (open one) → Issues → (open an issue)

An issue is drafted a few days before it is due — you choose how many on the Settings tab. You get a Slack card and, if you have asked for it, an email. Open the issue and you can send yourself a test copy, re-fetch the articles and events, edit any of the copy, and then approve it with a send time.

Approving stores exactly the email you just read. If anything about the issue changes afterwards, the send stops rather than going out with something nobody reviewed — you will see a message saying so, and re-approving fixes it.

An issue nobody has approved is never sent, even once its send time has passed. You get a reminder instead, and the issue stays a draft.

PostYard starts in dry-run: it does all the work, logs every recipient, and emails nobody. There is also a redirect mode that sends every copy to one inbox of yours, tagged with who it was really for. Both are the same two switches the member-email send uses, under Settings → HubSpot — one setting, not two, so you cannot turn one off and believe you turned both off.

The badge at the top of every newsletter screen tells you which mode you are in, and an approval in Slack says it out loud too.

Every email carries an unsubscribe link and the header that makes Gmail and Outlook show their own one-click unsubscribe button. That matters: if someone cannot find a way out easily, the way they take is "mark as spam", which damages your sending reputation for everyone else on the list.

An unsubscribe is recorded by PostYard itself and takes effect immediately — including part-way through a send that is already going out. Optionally it is also mirrored into HubSpot, which needs an extra permission on your HubSpot token; PostYard's own list is what actually stops the email either way.

Tag @postyard and ask it to add something to the newsletter — a link, a note, a file. It is held for the NEXT issue and nothing is sent; the reply tells you which newsletter it went to, when that issue goes out, and how many items are waiting.