Building an Email List + Sending Broadcasts

What you get

An email list addon that does the three things a real mailing-list tool does:

1. A signup form on your site (we host the form at yoursite.com/email-signup/).
2. Double opt-in — visitors confirm via email before they're added to your list. Required by spam law (CAN-SPAM, GDPR).
3. A composer in your dashboard where you write and send broadcasts to your confirmed subscribers.

All included in the $10/mo hosting. No separate tool (Mailchimp / ConvertKit / etc.) needed for small-business newsletter use cases.

How visitors subscribe

1. Visitor fills out the form on /email-signup/.
2. We send a confirmation email with a link.
3. Visitor clicks the link → they're now a confirmed subscriber.
4. The same email includes an unsubscribe link they can use at any time.

If they don't click the confirmation link, they stay in "pending" forever (won't receive any broadcasts).

How you send a broadcast

1. Open the Email List tab in your dashboard.
2. Click Compose.
3. Subject line + body (rich text or plain). Add an image, format, link as you would in any email tool.
4. Pick Send now or Schedule for later.
5. We dispatch in batches of 50 with pacing so we don't trip SES rate limits.

What's included by law (we enforce it)

Every broadcast you send through us automatically includes:

• A working unsubscribe link in both the HTML and plain-text body. We refuse to send without this.
• Honoring the unsubscribe — once a subscriber clicks unsubscribe, they're added to a global suppression list and will not receive any further mail from you (or anyone else on the platform, for that matter — same suppression list).
• A footer identifying you as the sender (your site name + URL).

You don't have to remember any of this — it's enforced by the platform. If you somehow remove the unsubscribe link, the send fails before going out.

Limits + practical numbers

• Subscribers per site: no hard limit. Performance has been tested cleanly to ~10,000 confirmed subscribers per site.
• Send batch size: 50 recipients per SES call, ~100ms between batches. Roughly 25,000 recipients takes under a minute.
• Daily SES quota: Hands Free Sites' overall SES sending quota is shared across all sites + dunning emails + contact-form notifications. If you're planning a >25,000-recipient broadcast, drop us a ticket first so we can verify daily quota headroom.
• Per-IP signup rate limit: 5 confirmations per IP per hour. Prevents random bots from filling your list.
• Confirmation tokens are unguessable — randomly generated UUIDs; not sequential, not based on the email.

Common questions

Can I import an existing list? Not yet via the dashboard. If you have a CSV from another tool, send us a ticket — we can do a one-time import (and we'll re-send confirmation if the list is older than 6 months, per best practice).

Can I have multiple lists? Currently one list per site. If you need segmentation, use the search filter in the subscriber list view.

Can I see who clicked / who opened? Open + click tracking is on our roadmap. Today you see who's a subscriber + send history (subject, recipient count, sent timestamp).

Can I send automated drip campaigns? Not yet. Today the tool is for periodic broadcasts (e.g., a monthly newsletter, an event announcement). Drips are on the roadmap.

Can I just paste my existing newsletter HTML? Yes — the composer accepts pasted HTML. Our footer + unsubscribe injection happens at send time, so your HTML stays untouched.