====== Melon's Post Office ======
The post office is a free newsletter service that allows you to collect e-mails from visitors to your site and send out weekly newsletters to them!

===== Writing Tips =====
News letters allow most simple HTML and you can design and layout your letter like a webpage!

What HTML is supported depends on your readers e-mail client/service, usually its best to keep your HTML fairly basic, most tags will work with the exception of:
  * iFrames or other embeds
  * Scripts
  * Some complex CSS may not work

Consider creating sections with H1 and P tags to break up your e-mail, and remember a newsletter can be as short or as long as you like, but its best not to make them tooo long.

You can embed external images in your newsletters, however many e-mail clients will give readers the option to not load external images, so keep that in mind!

===== Getting People to Subscribe =====
It's a good idea to include a link to your newsletter signup page somewhere on your homepage. The Post Office supplies a simple signup form that you can style with your own CSS file.

You can also create your own form on your site following this template - get your list-id from the end of your join url:
<code><form method='POST' action="https://letters.melonland.net/join.php">
  <input type='hidden' name='list' value='{YOUR MAILING LIST ID}' />
  <input type='email' name='email' required maxlength='120'><br>
  <input type='text' name='nickname' required maxlength='32'><br>
  <button type='submit'>Subscribe to My Newsletter!</button>
</form></code>
//Fun fact, you can add a target="my_iframe_id" to your form if you'd like it to open in an iframe and not leave your site!//


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====== Privacy ======
Melon's Post Office follows standard [[guidelines|MelonLand Guidelines]] and issues or misuse should be reported to a forum moderator.

===== Subscribers / Guests =====
When you subscribe to a newsletter your e-mail, nickname and join date is stored in our database. We do not log or track any additional information. This database is not shared with any external services, and it is not accessible by any other MelonLand sites.

If you unsubscribe from a newsletter your e-mail is immediately deleted from the database (it may take up to a week for it to vanish from server backups too) ~ this will not effect other subscriptions if you follow multiple newsletters.

Subscriptions are currently anonymous e.g. Subscriber e-mails are not visible to newsletter authors. This may change in the future, and/or mailing list subscribers may be handed over to a newsletter author in special situations; such as a list moving to a new newsletter service.

We do not collect any analytics about e-mail opening, however authors may embed their own.

===== Authors / Forum Members =====
The post office accesses forum accounts to log you in, no additional account info is created.

Newsletter drafts are held in memory for an indefinite amount of time and are periodically deleted.  Archives of sent newsletters are held permanently. Archives are currently private to authors, however there may be an option to change this in the future.

Password protected mailing lists are not encrypted and should be considered low-security.