A Newsletter That Doesn't Watch Your Readers

Every site on Static Host UK now has its own mailing list, on the Newsletter tab. People sign up on your pages, confirm by email, and hear from you in plain text. You can see how many emails arrived and how many people left. You cannot see who opened what, and neither can we. We left that out on purpose.

Why there is no open rate

An open rate feels like knowing who is reading. Since 2021 it mostly isn’t. Apple Mail’s privacy protection loads the images in emails in advance, whether anyone reads them or not, so a share of every “open” is a machine. Measuring it anyway means a tracker in the inbox of every person who trusted you with their address.

We would rather your list could say, truthfully, that their address is used for nothing else. The statistics show what you can act on: how many emails were delivered, how many bounced, how many were reported as spam, and how many people unsubscribed afterwards.

What it does for you

• People sign up from a form on your own page, either a one-line widget in your site’s colour or plain HTML, and join only when they click the link in the confirmation email, so everyone on your list chose to be there
• If anyone ever asks whether a person agreed, you can export the date they signed up and the date they confirmed
• People who already agreed can be imported with the date they agreed
• Emails can greet each reader by name, and replies come straight back to you
• You can send a preview to yourself or a collaborator before anyone else sees it

Your email arrives

Many small businesses run their mail on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 with a DMARC policy, a setting that tells other mail servers to refuse anything sent in the domain’s name from somewhere else. It is good protection, and it is also why newsletters sent “as you” by an outside service often vanish.

So on the free tier your emails come from newsletter@statichost.uk as “Your name via Static Host UK”, with replies going to your own address. They arrive, and there is nothing for you to set up.

The other rules exist for the same reason: one careless list can send everyone’s mail to junk, including yours.

• Your first email on a new list waits up to 24 hours while we look at it; after that, sends go straight out
• If too many emails on a list bounce or are reported as spam, sending on that list pauses and we email you
• A hard bounce stops mail to that address, and a spam report unsubscribes it
• Every email carries an unsubscribe link and the headers Gmail and Outlook use for their own unsubscribe button
• The unsubscribe link opens a page with a button, so the link scanners in company mail systems cannot unsubscribe people just by visiting it

When you want your own name on it

The free tier covers 100 contacts and 4 emails in any 30 days. Newsletter Plus, at £20 / site / month, is for when people should see your name, not ours:

• Send from your own address, or from your own domain with two DNS records, signed in your name
• Up to 1,000 contacts and 30 emails in any 30 days
• Designed emails: a rich-text editor, pasted HTML or your own template, cleaned of scripts and anything that reaches outside the email before it is stored

Here is how that sits against the tools people usually reach for:

Turn it on or off per site whenever you like, or bundle it across many sites as a reseller.

Getting started

Open your site in the dashboard and go to Newsletter. Confirm a reply address, write a footer saying who you are, and put the sign-up form on a page. Your first reader can sign up today. The newsletter guide walks through each step, and the feature page has the full list.

Questions to .