Svelte: An "official" svelte newsletter?

[d3sandoval]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Svelte currently has a blog at svelte.dev/blog.
It also now has monthly posts covering what's new (see #5429 and #5554 )
I've been copy/pasting the post and sending it out via svelte.substack.com so that the 200 or so subscribers get an email when a new post is up.
To help drive traffic to the svelte.dev site AND standardize communication with the community, it'd be nice to have a way to send emails for our new blog posts (or at least the "what's new in svelte" monthly posts, whatever is easier)

Describe the solution you'd like
We've discussed this a bit on the #contributing channel in the discord and came up with the following options:

1. Use a free (or free for small lists) solution, but not controlled by svelte, solution (e.g. keep using substack but hand over the keys, or switch to revue, tinyletter, buttondown, etc.)
2. Use a self-hosted solution like SendPortal or listmonk
3. Build it ourselves! Maybe just a github action integrated with Amazon SES, Sendgrid, or any other email API? We would need a (private) place to store our email list.

Both 1 and 2 would probably require copying the finished text over to a platform or maybe integrating with an API in the CI. Number 3 is probably a CI-only option.

No matter which option we choose, I'm really hoping we can also add a "subscribe" box somewhere on the blog so that folks won't have to go to a completely separate site to get email updates.

How important is this feature to you?
Medium priority. It's totally not a big deal for me to copy/paste to the "unofficial" newsletter every month. I just want to do the right thing by the community and transfer the list over to be "controlled" by the svelte site.

Additional context
Feel free to close this if we think it makes more sense to keep the "email blast" power out of the project and/or prefer that it remains "unofficial". Happy to discuss other options as well :)

[antony]

Given the current schedule of the maintainers, I would suggest that this would start as a community project, vs something that we would be looking to build.

FWIW I'm very opposed to using sendgrid since their free/low-cost solution's email sending reliability is pretty terrible right now as they have a spam and phishing problem, and their documentation is abysmal.

I've started switching over to Mailjet recently, which has the advantages of a decent API and excellent documentation. However one specific reason is that we can use their own language to remove the burden of creating the horrible email HTML required by most mail clients See https://mjml.io/

[kevmodrome]

I can set this up as part of Svelte Society but I feel like it should be an official newsletter (pretty much a copy of the one that goes up on the blog). MJML looks great! It would give much more "street cred" if it was sent from svelte.dev..

[d3sandoval]

@kevmodrome i think this @antony's suggestion for this to start as a community project is a great opportunity to bring svelte society and svelte.dev closer together. By having the blog posts on the svelte.dev website and the email coming from a svelte society handle, it'll make it super clear that the newsletter is community run + maintainer approved :) Plus, it'd make it easier to send non-newsletter emails to the list without it feeling spammy.

Mailjet also has an email capture & storage feature that we would need if we wanted to embed a "sign up for the newsletter" section on the blog itself.

Who would be the right person from Svelte Society to sign up for an account on Mailjet (or another similarly-priced competitor)?

[kevmodrome]

Yes, I know what he's saying, I'm just trying to push it to be from the official Svelte domain because I think it carries more "weight". :)

[d3sandoval]

Bump. @kevmodrome how do you feel about setting this up with me sometime this month, in time for the Jan 1 newsletter?