Buttondown Release Notes

For most authors, previewing your email is casual—you might be checking some design details or tracing formatting issues first-hand. After a while, you've seen it all. But then there are the more nuanced cases: testing how your newsletter looks for different subscriber types, verifying paywall behavior, or making sure CTAs render correctly—which is why we added earlier this year the ability to view the paywall version of paid emails. Then there are the more esoteric cases where you want to test templating functionality or tags. Historically, the only way to do this was to actually send test emails to fake subscribers you've created, which match whatever state you're trying to test. This is time-consuming and cumbersome. Finally, though, we've got a better option.

You can now select any subscriber from your list directly in the preview panel. When you do, the email renders exactly as it would for that subscriber—using their metadata, subscription status, tags, and all the other personalization that makes your emails feel personal. No more creating fake test subscribers or sending yourself drafts just to see how {{ subscriber.metadata.first_name }} resolves for different people.

This works for both the email and web previews, and it's particularly useful for:

• Testing personalization tags with real subscriber data
• Verifying how premium content renders for different subscription types
• Checking that conditional logic works correctly (like showing different content based on tags or metadata)
• Seeing how your email looks for subscribers with different locales or custom metadata

The subscriber selector appears in the preview panel when you're editing an email. Just click the dropdown, search for a subscriber by email address, and select them. The preview updates instantly to show how that subscriber would see your email.

This replaces the old "free vs. premium" preview split—now you can preview as any subscriber, not just generic free or premium ones. Much more flexible, and way less work than the old approach.

Managed DNS

Your sending domain is the domain that you send emails from, like [email protected].

Previously, when you added your domain to Buttondown, we gave you a list of DNS records to add. These records verified you with one of our email sending providers, so that we could use your domain to send emails on your behalf.

However, if we ever wanted to change email sending providers, or switch you between multiple providers, we would have to ask you to update your DNS again.

With Managed DNS, you choose a subdomain that you can dedicate to Buttondown (such as newsletter.example.com or email.example.com) and delegate control of that subdomain to Buttondown by adding two NS (nameserver) records that point to our servers.

From then on, Buttondown can control the DNS records for that subdomain, allowing us to switch you between email sending providers — and even register you for new ones — without you needing to get involved. We'll do this to improve deliverability, or in case of provider outages.

This is a fully backward-compatible addition, and you are totally welcome to keep your current domain setup indefinitely. If you'd like to switch to Managed (totally optional!), enter a unique subdomain in your Buttondown domain settings and then add the two NS records under Managed on the sending domain page.

For more information, check out the updated sending domain documentation.

You can now send emails that are filtered to subscribers within a specific last open or last click date range!

This makes it easy to run win-back or reactivation campaigns—one final check-in with subscribers who haven't been interacting with your emails before you clean your list.

Now... Whether list cleaning is worth it depends on your situation. Keeping your list tidy is generally a good idea, and removing subscribers who haven't opened in a long time can help maintain good deliverability. But, as with all things, proceed with caution. Open tracking isn't perfect—some email clients block tracking pixels entirely, so those subscribers might look inactive even if they're reading faithfully.

Our recommendation: start conservative. If you're trying to clean up a large list, try sending to subscribers who haven't opened in over a year and ask them to reply if they want to stay on board.

We've been quietly toiling behind the scenes to change how notes work within Buttondown. Historically, they've existed as a simple scratchpad for your subscribers—a big blob of text that you can edit and tweak however you'd like without any semblance of structure. This is good. Worse is better, as they say. But such a lackadaisical approach to note-taking does have its drawbacks and limitations. It's hard to know when or who is behind a note, for instance. It's hard to recover notes that you've deleted. And so we've been quietly architecting a better note-taking system in which notes are less like sticky notes and more like index cards. You create them once at a point in time and apply them to a subscriber. This looks like what you see below:

This is a more power user-ish way to do notes, obviously, which is why we have absolutely no plans to ever get rid of the classic freeform method. But this method does afford us the ability to do some nicer long-standing things, such as the ability to bulk add notes to a wide swath of subscribers:

This is great for keeping track of things without tabbing into a dozen subscribers at once: we've already seen folks use it as a way to bookmark who has a given coupon or manually track offline events such as registrations or purchases.

We launched the first seed of what we now call the Portal back in June of last year. It felt both overdue and clumsy: we wanted to strike a balance between giving subscribers a way to manage their subscriptions and not overwhelming them with too many options, nor forcing ourselves into the revered writer-reader relationship. And we've been slowly adding new functionality to it (like referrals and email address changes) ever since, to the point where it's a pretty full-featured tool for subscribers to manage themselves insteaad of having to reach out to you directly.

But one big flaw remained. In many ways, this flaw is deeply embedded with one of Buttondown's core design decisions, which is to remove ourselves from the conversation between you and your readers as much as possible. We dithered for a long time about whether or not subscribers could or should be able to log into Buttondown directly, and after a long series of internal debates and external gut checks, we have arrived at an answer: yes (the fact that this feature has been soft launched for only a few weeks and already has been used thousands of times indicates we made the right choice). Now, when a subscriber goes to buttondown.com/login and attempts to log in, they'll be directed towards a dashboard containing all of their current and previous subscriptions, as well as links into each individual newsletter that they're subscribed to. Feedback we've gotten from both readers and writers has been frankly exultant, and we feel a little silly having not done this earlier.

Webwall

demo.buttondown.com /

This is a live demo. You can view this page on our live demo site, too.

A webwall enables you to add content that will only be displayed on the web. Any content below the webwall will not be included in the email sent to email clients.

This is great for web-specific features like interactive elements, subscription forms, or content that enhances the reading experience online.

Both components work seamlessly with your existing content and give you the flexibility to tailor your message for different audiences and contexts.

You can learn more about these dynamic blocks and see examples in our Fancy mode documentation.

Emailwall

An emailwall, conversely, enables you to add content that will only be displayed in the email sent to subscribers. Any content below the emailwall will not be included in the web version of your email.

This is perfect for email-specific CTAs, subscriber-only announcements, or content that doesn't make sense in a web archive.

Wait, hasn't this been around for a while?

Kind of!
In late 2023, we launched a way to do this via templating. But now you can do it in Fancy mode! (The older method still works too, of course.)