Email campaigns

Campaigns are newsletters to your subscribers, written in Studio with email-safe versions of your site’s blocks and sent through your own email provider.

Why your own sender?

Marketing email is the one thing that would make a free service expensive, and deliverability depends on the sender’s reputation. So campaigns go out through a provider you connect once — Resend, Postmark, Amazon SES or Cloudflare — whose free tiers cover most small lists. The reputation is yours, and the commons doesn’t pay for anyone’s marketing.

Set up sending (owners)

Open Campaigns → Sending setup:

1. Pick a provider and enter the from name and address, a reply-to address and the provider’s credentials. Credentials are encrypted and never shown again.
2. Add the DNS records shown — SPF, DKIM and DMARC — at your domain, and press Check records. Each sender shows Ready to send, Needs DNS records or Not checked yet. Sending needs a verified custom domain.
3. Copy the one-time bounce webhook address into your provider, so bounces and spam complaints are handled for you.

Write a campaign

• Subject, preview text and audience: everyone, or subscribers with certain tags (any or all of them). A live count shows how many people will receive it.
• Compose with email-safe blocks: text, heading, image, button, quote, columns, line, divider, spacer and social links. Drafts save as you type.
• Preview in desktop, phone and dark mode, with the inbox line as people will see it. Any rendering warnings are listed.
• Send yourself a test, then Send now or Schedule (designers and owners), each with a confirmation showing the audience size.

Sending limits

New senders start small. Each site can send campaign email to 100 people a day at first, and that limit doubles for every day you’ve sent without trouble (up to 50,000 a day), so a healthy list reaches full speed in about ten sending days. When a campaign is bigger than today’s limit, it keeps going the next day on its own; Campaigns shows how many sends are left today.

If more than 5% of recent emails bounce or more than 0.3% are marked as spam (over the last 30 days), sending pauses for the site and Studio explains why. Clean up the list (remove old or mistyped addresses, and only email people who asked to hear from you); sending resumes as the window moves on. Hub operators can change the starting limit and the ceiling (CAMPAIGN_DAILY_BASE, CAMPAIGN_DAILY_MAX).

Every email’s footer also shows the Hub operator’s abuse reporting address, so recipients can report spam or phishing directly.

Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe link and the standard headers mail apps use for their own unsubscribe button. Hard bounces and spam complaints are unsubscribed automatically.

Reports

After sending, a campaign shows delivered, clicked (and the click rate per link), bounced and marked as spam. Opens aren’t counted unless you turn on “Count opens” for that campaign — OpenSpace is privacy-first, and open tracking needs a tracking pixel.