A newsletter here is not a second thing you write. It is a post you publish, with one box ticked.
The box is Email in the post editor sidebar, and it says Email this post to subscribers. Tick it, publish, and the post goes out.
Before any of this works, email has to be set up: a Resend key, and a verified newsletter sender. See set up email. Until it is, the box says so rather than pretending.
Who it goes to
Audience, in the same box:
| Mode | Recipients |
|---|---|
| All subscribers | Everyone on your list who has opted in to the newsletter. |
| Only paid | Paying and comped members only. |
| Custom by plan | A checkbox each: Free, then one per paid tier. Tick the ones you mean. |
Two things are written down — that the post should be emailed, and your intent about who. The people are never written down. A list of names is true for about as long as it takes somebody to cancel, so the recipients are worked out from the intent when the send happens.
Under the audience, the box counts what you have chosen: Emails 1,240 subscribers. If the count is zero it says so in bold, because a send to nobody is almost always a mistake in the audience rather than an empty list.
A paid post splits in two
Choose All subscribers on a post that is paid, and the send becomes two:
- readers whose tier opens the post get the full article
- everyone else gets the preview and a link to subscribe
The box says so in two lines — 820 get a preview and a link to subscribe · 420 get the full article. Nobody is ever emailed an article they could not open on the site, whatever audience you choose. The paywall decides what; you decide who.
The five minutes after Publish
Nothing leaves immediately. The first email goes out five minutes after you hit Publish, and until then the box shows a Cancel send button.
That window exists for the typo you spot ten seconds too late. Press Cancel, fix the headline, reload the editor, tick the box again.
The delay is a real scheduled send at Resend rather than something your own site has to wake up to do, so a post published at 3am goes out at 3am on a site nobody is looking at. To change the window — or remove it — filter owldraft_publisher_newsletter_delay_minutes. Zero means publishing sends, and the box then offers no Cancel, because there is nothing left to stop.
A post is emailed once
Once a post has been emailed, the box says so — the audience it went to, the sender it came from, and, as Resend reports back, 1,180 of 1,240 delivered, 46% opened.
Editing that post and updating it does not email it again. This is deliberate: fixing a typo in a story from March must not mail it to your entire list. The box tells you how to re-arm a post if you genuinely want to send it twice.
Posts that predate the plugin are never ticked by default for the same reason.
Where it comes from
The From line in the box is your newsletter sender, set on OwlDraft → Email. If none is set the box says No sender set. Nothing can be emailed until there is one, and links you there.
Replies go to your site’s admin address — a Resend sending domain cannot receive mail.
What lands in the inbox
A 600-pixel centred table: your publication’s name, the post title, the byline, the article, a call to action, and the footer with the unsubscribe link in it. It is a table rather than a modern layout because Outlook renders Word’s HTML engine, and a newsletter that reads beautifully everywhere else and spans 1,400 pixels in Outlook looks broken to the readers most likely to be paying you.
The unsubscribe link in the footer is Resend’s own, and clicking it reaches your site: the reader’s newsletter flag is turned off within moments, by webhook. See bounces, unsubscribes and the mail log.
To change the shell around the article, filter owldraft_publisher_newsletter_html (the whole document) or owldraft_publisher_newsletter_footer (the footer alone). The merge tag in the footer is triple-braced and must stay that way.
What readers subscribe with
The newsletter flag is one box on the sign-up form, ticked by default, and a reader can change their mind in three places: the Newsletter block, their Account page, and the unsubscribe link in any email. All three write the same flag, so they cannot disagree.
Next: the posts list.