Attach files to your emails
One of the delights in watching Buttondown take off over the past few years has been seeing the proliferation of use cases that, frankly, I never really imagined when I started building it. Teachers & faculty are using Buttondown to send lesson plans to their students; a peer group of poets uses Buttondown (“round robin style”, as I’ve been informed) to send over drafts to edit & critique; a food truck sends out weekly locations & specials.
One common thread that I sort of intentionally didn’t handle for a while was sending emails with files attached. This is not a particularly hard technical problem, nor is it a tricky UX problem — the core flow of dragging and dropping a file into an editing interface is all but solved!
The thing that gave me pause for so long was less the surface-level implementation and more the so-called “long tail” of choices and impacts that adding attachments would entail. Should Buttondown add tracking on downloads (so an author can see who’s downloaded what?)? How many attachments are allowed for a given email? What happens to attachments after they’ve been removed from an email? And so on. At risk of turning this anodyne blog post into a bit of a therapy session — this is what building software is like. Even the “easy” things come with hundreds of little microdecisions along the way, and I want to make sure that I get as many of those microdecisions right.
Anyhoo, after hemming and hawing for a fairly long time — attachments have arrived. They are exactly what I think you might expect they are: drag and drop, no fuss or muss. There’s no tracking or anything too-clever-by-half happening. Check it out:
And when you attach a file to your email, it’s downloadable on the web archive version too.
So — send your emails, with great care and joy and now also with as many (well, up to three) attachments as you’d like.
Previous posts
- A better Events view
- Secure your account with multi-factor authentication
- Get more premium subscribers by sending teasers of premium emails
- How I organize Buttondown's Django applications
- Buttondown's new pricing system
- Send archived emails to new subscribers
- Embed your subscribe form in the middle of your writing
- Granular tracking settings
- Migrating Buttondown to mypy
- Better upselling for premium subscriptions
- Support for Stripe Payment Links
- Pay-what-you-want subscriptions
- Spring 2021
- Support for HTTPS tracking links
- Email tracking is now off by default
- You can now integrate with Plausible!
- A nicer subscriber importing experience
- Referencing subscriber tags in your newsletter
- Accept whatever currency you want for your paid newsletter
- Slightly nicer Design settings
- Webhooks and the Programming page
- Buttondown in 2021
- Undo send
- Navigation updates
- Open Beta: European mail servers
- Set a custom unsubscription URL for your (sadly no-longer-subscribed) subscribers
- Compare analytics from multiple emails
- Saved draft recipients
- Buttondown's funding of open source software
- Why you need to include a physical address in your newsletter
- Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Weebly
- Annual subscriptions for paid newsletters
- Reminding folks to confirm their subscription
- Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Squarespace
- Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Webflow
- Embedding Instagram photos into your emails
- Customizing your subscription form to tag new subscribers
- How to opt out of analytics and email tracking
- Managing your drafts through the API
- Open Beta: Multiple newsletters
- Easy subscriber filters
- Scheduling emails through the API
- Sending newsletters that get delivered
- May Updates
- April Updates
- March Updates
- February Updates
- Winter Update
- June Updates
- May Updates
- April Updates
- March Updates
- Nicer archive pages!
- Markdown is easier than ever
- January Updates
- 2017: In Review
- Introducing subscriber events
- Learning about unsubscribed users
- A new blog
- Learn more about your subscribers!
- Send emails to certain tags!
- Gravatar support
- Subscriber sources
- Embeddable subscription widget
- Creating drafts via email
- Subscriber and archive search