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Guides

Running your own newsletter

Practical writing about deliverability, list building and what email marketing actually costs. Written for people who run their own mail, or are deciding whether to.

2 published No signup required to read any of them

Getting into the inbox

The technical half. Mostly DNS.

In progress: SPF, DKIM and DMARC, explained without the jargon · How to warm up a new sending domain

What it costs, and who owns what

Pricing, platform risk, ownership.

In progress: Self-hosted or hosted? An honest comparison · What happens when your email account gets suspended

Building a list

Opt-ins, sequences, first principles.

In progress: What is an autoresponder, really? · Double opt-in: worth the lost subscribers? · Writing a welcome sequence people actually read

Running a list

Cadence, hygiene, migration.

In progress: How often should you email your list? · How to migrate a list without wrecking it · Why deleting subscribers improves your results

Free download

Get the 7-Point Deliverability Checklist — free

The pre-send checks that decide whether a self-hosted newsletter reaches the inbox. One page, no fluff, sent immediately.

  • SPF, DKIM and DMARC in the order that actually works
  • The bounce and complaint thresholds Gmail acts on
  • A 12-line pre-send check you can run in two minutes

Double opt‑in: you will get one confirmation email and nothing else until you click it. One‑click unsubscribe in every message. We never sell or share your address.


This form is the product. It is the copy‑paste embed code from Rilato Autoresponder’s Subscribe Forms screen, posting into a live install on our own server. The confirmation email you are about to receive was queued by the same cron job you will be running an hour after you buy.