Newsletters At Scale (wip)

by Malcolm Diggs

This book is a work in progress. This repo contains the full source text of the book in its current state, in markdown format, separated by chapter. From here, the book can be compiled to other formats (EPUB, PDF etc).

Table of Contents

Front Matter

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Preface
• Introduction

Section I: Email Fundamentals

• What is email?
• How email has evolved
• Transactional email vs Marketing email
• Email service providers
• Email clients

Section II: Sending and Receiving

• The internet backbone
• IP Addresses
• Networking protocols
• Sending protocols
• Receiving protocols
• Domains
• Nameservers and DNS
• Security
• Authentication frameworks
• Bounces: Hard & Soft
• Retries and exponential backoff
• Gmail tabs
• HTML and Text in Email clients

Section III: Newsletters

• Templating & Preprocessing (MJML)
• Mailing list managers
• Transactional Email providers
• List types (Drips & Blasts)
• Subscriptions / Opt-Ins
• Unsubscribes / Opt-Outs
• Webviews
• User-preferences
• Tracking opens
• Tracking clicks
• Handling forwards

Section IV: Compliance

• What is spam?
• The primary compliance regimes (as of 2024)
• Double Opt-In
• Spam Reports
• Spam Filters
• Sender reputation
• IP Reputation
• Gmail Specific Rules
• Street Address Requirements
• Avoiding the spam box (best practices)

Section V: Integrating

• Design and architecture patterns
• Running Letterman server(s)
• Clients and widgets
• Sending Transactional email
• Managing Lists
• Managing Drips
• Managing Blasts
• Managing Segments
• Managing Logs
• Automation
• Price estimation
• Monetization
• Gating / Paywalling
• Promotion (Google Ads for Gmail)

Section VI: Scaling

• Things that don't scale
• Reactivity and distributed systems
• Scaling users (subscribers)
• Pruning / Keeping lists healthy
• Scaling sequences/drips
• Scaling announcements/blasts
• Fault tolerance
• At-least once delivery

Section VII: Migrating

• What is vendor lock-in?
• The realities of migration
• How to migrate
• Need help?

Back Matter

• Appendix I: A primer on computational complexity
• Appendix II: A primer on reactive infrastructure
• Appendix III: A primer on CRDTs and CAP theorem
• Appendix IV: Letterman Performance Benchmarks

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License

Newsletters as Scale (c) 2024 by Malcolm Diggs

Newsletters as Scale is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

You should have received a copy of the license along with this work. If not, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/