By default, Buttondown newsletters allow public subscriptions. Anyone can sign up for your newsletter by visiting your newsletter's public page and completing the subscription form. To learn more about adding subscribers, read Building your subscriber base.
However, you may wish to keep your newsletter private. For example, if you're sending a newsletter to a small group of friends or colleagues, or if you're using Buttondown to send internal updates to your team at work, you probably don't want just anyone to be able to subscribe to it.
Enabling private mode
To do that, head over to and enable the "Private mode" setting.
- Navigate to the Subscribing settings page.
- Click to enable the "Private mode" toggle. A warning appears.
- Click I understand and then click Save changes.
When private mode is enabled, your newsletter will not allow public subscriptions, even from a form endpoint. Instead, only subscribers you have added from the Buttondown dashboard or the API will receive your newsletter.
Private mode and newsletter archives
Private mode is different from disabling your newsletter's archives. The archive collects all the newsletter emails you sent in the past. You can enable or disable the archives by toggling the "Archives" setting on the Archives settings page.
Here's how private mode interacts with your newsletter's archives:
- If you turn off your archives, your archives will not be accessible. This is useful if you're hosting the archives elsewhere (for example, on your own website) or just don't want people to be able to read them. This is true whether your newsletter is public, meaning anyone can subscribe to it, or private.
- If you turn on your archives and enable Private mode, your newsletter will be private, and your archives will be accessible to the public.