Overview
Newsletter Settings
Set your CAN-SPAM sender identity, authenticate a sending domain, pick between Gatsby's SendGrid account and your own, and style the footer that appears on every newsletter you send.
Set once, applies to every newsletter you send.
Four settings live here: who the mail says it’s from, which domain it’s authenticated on, whose SendGrid account carries it, and what the footer looks like. They apply org-wide, so a campaign author never has to think about any of them.
Newsletter sender identity
Your legal name and mailing address, printed in every footer.
From address
The address subscribers see, and the one Gatsby verifies.
Sender domain
Gatsby’s SendGrid account, or one you bring yourself.
Email footer
Brand color, an intro line, social links. The required lines are locked.
Finding it
Section titled “Finding it”Team Settings → Newsletters.
Super Admins and Admins see the tab. If you can’t see it and something here needs changing, ask an Admin on your team, or email help@gatsby.events.
Company legal name and address
Section titled “Company legal name and address” Filling it in
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Open Team Settings → Newsletters.
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The Newsletter sender identity card comes prefilled from your billing address.
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Check the Company legal name. Edit it if your newsletter goes out under a brand or DBA rather than the entity on the invoice.
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Check the address: Address line 1, an optional second line, City, State / territory, and ZIP code.
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Save changes.
Country is fixed to the United States. The page says it plainly: newsletters are available to US-based senders only for now.
Your billing address itself is edited in Plan & Billing, and the card links there.
Which name to use
Use the name a subscriber would recognize. If your firm is Meridian Capital Partners LLC but everyone knows you as Meridian, and Meridian is what’s on the invitations, put Meridian here. The point of the requirement is that the reader can tell who emailed them.
A PO box is acceptable under CAN-SPAM if it’s registered to you. An address that doesn’t reach you is not.
From address
Section titled “From address” Setting it
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In the From address card, enter a From name. Optional, and it’s the display name subscribers see, like Meridian Insights.
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Enter the From email. This has to be on your authenticated sending domain.
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Save changes.
Gatsby checks the address with SendGrid at the moment you save, rather than finding out at send time. Newsletter sends stay paused until a from address is set.
If the address is refused
You’ll see the reason inline and the field will be cleared rather than saved half-broken. Two common causes:
It isn’t on your authenticated domain. The From address card shows which domain you’re authenticated on. Your address has to be at that domain.
You’re on your own SendGrid account and the address isn’t verified there. Verification happens inside your SendGrid account rather than in Gatsby. Add the address there as a verified sender, or authenticate the domain it’s on, then come back and save.
Reply-to
There’s no org-wide reply-to. It’s set per campaign, and left blank it falls back to your newsletter sender identity. See Newsletter Campaigns.
Sender domain
Section titled “Sender domain”Two ways to send, and the choice is mostly about whether you already run SendGrid.
Gatsby shared domain (the default)
Your newsletters go out on Gatsby’s SendGrid account. You don’t create one, configure one, or pay SendGrid.
They still send from your address on your domain. Sending on Gatsby’s account is not the same as sending from a Gatsby address. You authenticate your domain either way.
This path carries a separate charge: $500 a year on top of the Newsletters add-on, billed with it. Bringing your own SendGrid key avoids it. See Plan & Billing.
Bring your own SendGrid
Connect a SendGrid API key and your newsletters send on your account, at your SendGrid rates, with your reputation.
Gatsby stores the key encrypted and shows it masked afterward. Replace key rotates it. The card shows two things about the key, and both have to be right:
Valid. The key authenticates. Gatsby re-checks this on a schedule, so an expired or revoked key surfaces before a send fails rather than after.
Events connected. SendGrid has to send delivery, open, click, bounce, drop and spam-report events back to Gatsby. Until it does, your metrics stay empty and bounce protection is off, which is the more serious half. Newsletters won’t send from your SendGrid account until this feed is connected. Use Connect on the card.
Branded link tracking lives in your own SendGrid account on this path, not in Gatsby. Set it up there if you want it. Gatsby leaves click tracking on unless SendGrid tells us the brand is invalid.
Switching between them
Switching clears your from address, because an address verified on one account isn’t necessarily verified on the other. Set it again after you switch, and send yourself a test before the next real campaign.
If you move from Gatsby’s account to your own and you’re paying the $500 Gatsby sending charge, cancel it in Plan & Billing so it doesn’t renew. Cancelling stops the next year. The year you’ve already paid isn’t refunded.
If sends are paused
A banner appears across the Newsletters pages when something is wrong with sending, and it names what. It’s scoped to Newsletters rather than following you around the rest of Gatsby, and it clears itself once the underlying problem is fixed. Fix in Newsletter Settings takes you straight back here.
Authenticating your domain
Section titled “Authenticating your domain”Authentication is how a receiving mail server confirms the message really came from you. Without it, mail from your domain sent by someone else’s servers looks exactly like a forgery, and gets filed accordingly.
Adding the records
Gatsby generates five CNAME records for your sending domain. Add them at your DNS provider, then click Check status.
Three of them authenticate the domain. Once those resolve the card reads Authenticated, names the domain, and confirms newsletters can send from any address on it. The other two brand your tracked links, and they’re graded separately. See Branded link tracking below.
Records usually propagate within an hour, and a provider that caches aggressively can take up to 48. A record can flip between Verified and Not found while it settles, so leave a few minutes between checks rather than re-checking straight away.
Don’t manage DNS? Forward this to your IT team writes the email for you, with all five records in it. Once everything is verified the table collapses, and View DNS records brings it back.
This is self-serve. You don’t need to open a support ticket to get a domain authenticated.
Branded link tracking
Two of the five records point a subdomain of yours at the click tracker, so a tracked link in your newsletter goes out on something like url1234.yourdomain.com instead of a redirect domain shared with every other SendGrid customer.
It’s worth doing. Spam filters score the root domain of the links inside an email, and a shared redirector carries whatever reputation every other sender on it has earned. It also doesn’t match the domain your mail says it came from, which is its own small signal against you.
Your newsletters send without these two. What you give up is click data. Rather than rewrite links through a domain that isn’t resolving, which would break every link in the email, Gatsby turns link tracking off for the campaign and says so on the card. The Authenticated badge doesn’t wait for them either, so a domain with three of five records verified is a sendable domain.
If a record won't verify
Check status grades each row on its own and says what’s wrong with the ones that failed:
Proxied. The record exists, but your DNS provider is answering for it rather than returning the value you entered. Set it to DNS only. In Cloudflare that’s the Proxy status column on the record.
Points somewhere else. A record with that host already exists and holds a different value. Replace the value with the one Gatsby shows.
Not found. Nothing at that host. Check for typos, and remember some providers append your domain to whatever you type in the host field.
Couldn’t check. A lookup that didn’t answer. Re-check in a few minutes.
Removing a domain
Remove domain on the same card. Do this only when you’re moving to a different sending domain, and expect to set the from address again afterward.
Set both branded-link records to DNS only. Some DNS providers can answer for a record with their own servers instead of handing back the value you entered. Cloudflare calls that setting Proxied, and CNAME flattening has the same effect. Either one stops the links in your newsletters working.
Switching a record to proxied after it’s verified breaks the links in newsletters you have already sent, not only the ones still to come. Gatsby re-checks the records daily, and the sending domain card goes back to reporting link tracking as off. Set the record to DNS only again and all of those links start working, including in mail already sitting in someone’s inbox.
Your event email has its own sender configuration, separate from this one. Authenticating a domain for newsletters doesn’t change how invitations send. See Sender Settings.
What you can change, and what you can’t
Section titled “What you can change, and what you can’t” The parts you style
Brand color sets the rule above the footer.
Intro line is one optional sentence, sitting at the top of the block. Something like Thanks for being part of our community.
Social links are optional and there are four slots: Website, LinkedIn, X, and Instagram. Only the ones you fill in appear.
A Live preview beside the fields redraws as you type, so you can see the whole footer before saving.
The parts that are locked
Three things always render, pulled from your sender identity above:
- Your company legal name
- Your physical address
- The unsubscribe link
They can’t be removed, restyled away, or dropped by uploading HTML that omits them. Gatsby adds the footer after your HTML, on its way out.
There’s also a line naming the newsletter the reader subscribed to, so someone who’s forgotten why they’re hearing from you has an answer without having to reply and ask.
One footer, every newsletter
The footer is org-wide. Every newsletter in your organization uses it, and there’s no per-newsletter override. Change it here and the next campaign from any newsletter picks it up.
Common Questions
Section titled “Common Questions” Do I have to authenticate a domain, or can I just use a Gatsby address?
You authenticate a domain. Newsletters send from your address on your domain on both sending paths, and the from address has to be on the authenticated one.
What's the difference between the $500 Gatsby sending charge and the Newsletters add-on?
The Newsletters add-on buys the feature. The $500 a year buys sending it on Gatsby’s SendGrid account instead of one you run yourself. If you already have SendGrid, connect your key and skip the charge. Both are on the same add-on row in Plan & Billing.
Our legal name and our brand are different. Which goes in the footer?
The name subscribers know you by, as long as it’s a name your organization actually trades under. Gatsby prefills from billing because that’s usually right, and lets you edit it because it isn’t always.
Can each newsletter have its own sender or footer?
Not today. Sender identity, from address, sending path and footer are all org-wide. Reply-to is the one thing set per campaign.
My key says Valid but SendGrid events aren't connected. Can I send?
No, and that’s on purpose. The Events connected line on the card is about SendGrid’s feed of delivery and bounce notifications. It has nothing to do with your Gatsby events. Without that feed Gatsby can’t see bounces, so it can’t stop sending to addresses that are failing. Use Connect on the sender domain card to wire it up.
Does any of this touch our event email?
No. Newsletter credentials and event email credentials are held apart, and neither sending path can reach the other’s. Changing a setting here has no effect on invitations, confirmations, or reminders.