Newsletter Infrastructure Review: What Eight Months of Sends Taught Me

Newsletters are the most reliable distribution channel I run. Social feeds fragment. Search rankings shift. Email stays. After eight months of running a newsletter on my own infrastructure, I have learned what matters and what is noise.

The Stack That Worked

AWS SES for sending (under $1 per thousand emails)
DynamoDB for subscriber list
Lambda for send workers
SQS for per-recipient queueing
Double opt-in flow
Plain text plus HTML multipart emails

Total cost for eight months of sends: less than $20.

What Matters for Deliverability

Deliverability is the single hardest part of running a newsletter. What actually moved the needle:

SPF, DKIM, DMARC configured correctly
Plain-text fallback in every email
Visible unsubscribe link, List-Unsubscribe header
Consistent from address, warmed over time
No image-only emails, no tracking pixels in the header

Doing those five things correctly from day one mattered more than any tool choice.

The Engagement Reality

Open rates are a lie now. Apple Mail Privacy inflates them. What I actually track:

Click-through rate: signal a human read and acted
Reply rate: strongest signal, rare but meaningful
Unsubscribe rate: if it spikes, the content is off

Stop obsessing over opens. Track clicks and replies.

The Content Discipline

Every newsletter I wrote followed a simple structure:

One insight up top
One practical example in the middle
One clear link at the bottom

No roundups. No padding. Readers can skim in 30 seconds.

What I Would Change

I underinvested in segmentation early. Sending the same content to everyone is easy but wasteful. Next year I will add lightweight segmentation based on which articles subscribers click.

The Compounding Asset

Every subscriber added this year is a subscriber I still reach next year. That compounding is why email beats every other channel. The list is the asset. Protect it, respect it, and send it things worth reading.

The Sending Cadence

Weekly worked better than daily for my newsletter. Daily publishing happened on the site. The newsletter digested the week. Subscribers want a reason to open, not an obligation to keep up. Lower cadence, higher quality per send, better relationship.

Infrastructure Lessons Worth Keeping

SQS per-recipient queueing isolated failures cleanly
SES suppression list handling saved me from silent bounces
DynamoDB streams triggered welcome emails reliably
Idempotent send handlers prevented duplicate deliveries

Each of those is a small engineering choice that paid back across hundreds of sends.

For the current CAN-SPAM and deliverability requirements, see the AWS SES best practices guide.