Email for media sites: tips@, letters@, and the newsletter

A media site's masthead is a list of email addresses. tips@ for the thing somebody is afraid to say on the record, letters@ for the readers who write back, corrections@ because you will need it, plus pitches@, ads@, and a byline address for anyone who files. Google Workspace hands out up to 30 free aliases per paid seat, which sounds like the answer until you notice where they land: one person's mailbox, configured per seat, invisible to the desk. The news editor is on a flight and the tip sits unread.

The newsletter meter is the second problem, and for a publisher it is the strange one. Ghost's Publisher plan is $29 a month at 1,000 members on annual billing and $88 at 10,000, and free signups push you up the tiers exactly like paying ones do. beehiiv's Scale plan runs $43 and $96 at the same sizes annually, and subscriber 10,001 moves you into the next tier, $169 a month on monthly billing. Substack keeps 10 percent of paid revenue forever. Audience growth is the number you take to advertisers and the number that raises your invoice.

Then the replies arrive. A newsletter with a human voice generates human mail, and most of it lands in whichever editor's inbox is on the From line, where it becomes that editor's private correspondence rather than the publication's.

What LetterDuck replaces

Every address on the domain is a routing rule rather than a mailbox, so tips@, letters@, and corrections@ cost nothing and thread into the same shared inbox. Any editor opens the thread and replies as the address it came to, with In-Reply-To and References headers so the conversation stays one on the reader's end. The composer, the contact records, and the deliverability layer sit in the same $50: authentication managed, a warm-up throttle in the send path, automatic suppression, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe on every campaign.

The math at your size

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Ghost(Pro): Ghost(Pro) on annual billing, cheapest plan that fits the member count. Starter caps at 1,000 members and cannot sell paid memberships. beehiiv: Scale plan on annual billing. On monthly billing the same list sizes cost $49, $49, $89 and $109. The free Launch plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

Below about 2,500 subscribers, do not switch. beehiiv's Launch plan is free to 2,500 with a hosted site and podcast, and Ghost's Starter is $15 a month annual up to 1,000 members. Read Starter's fine print first though: since July 2025 it carries no paid memberships and one newsletter, and it hard-caps at 1,000 members, so the moment you sell a subscription or grow past the cap you are on Publisher at $29 and climbing.

Above that the shape changes. A 10,000-member publication pays Ghost $1,056 a year or beehiiv $1,151 on annual billing, against $600 here, and the gap widens with every free signup. What you give up is real: Ghost is a website, a CMS, a members system, and a newsletter in one product, takes 0 percent of subscription revenue, is MIT-licensed so you can eject to self-hosting, and grandfathers existing customers when it raises prices. We are email. If the publication itself needs hosting, read Ghost vs Substack; the subscriber-tier version of this argument is in LetterDuck vs beehiiv.

We run a media site on this

NostalgiaPost is our own publication, and its mail has run on LetterDuck since June 2026. That is one small single-tenant workspace, not a customer base, and we would rather say so than imply a scale we do not have. What it does give us is a production system we operate rather than describe.

Every address on the domain routes through a catch-all into a Cloudflare Email Worker. The raw message is read once, parsed, and written to the database as the source of truth before anything else happens to it. Nothing depends on a forwarding rule holding up, which matters because in June 2026 we watched Gmail silently reject about 73 percent of the mail we were mirroring to it: forwarding broke DMARC alignment, and the rejections were invisible from our side. We replaced the forward with an API insert and kept the ingest path as the record.

Since then a canary message runs the whole production path every two hours: DNS, routing, the Worker, the parser, the database. It is absorbed on ingest and never shown to anyone, and if it fails to complete the round trip we get an email. Silence means healthy. The full teardown is in how we monitor our own inbound email, and what a catch-all address really does explains the piece publishers most often set up wrong.

Who should stay where they are

If you need the website as well as the mail, buy Ghost. Nothing here renders a homepage, hosts a podcast, or gates an article. Stay on Substack if discovery is doing the work: the app, Notes, and recommendations acquire readers a standalone email tool never will, and 10 percent of nothing is nothing while you are small. We also do not process payments or run a paywall, so a publication living on paid memberships needs its own Stripe and its own gate.

The media sites we fit are the ones whose email has quietly become a second newsroom: several public addresses, a newsletter with a growing free list, and reader mail nobody owns. Starting from a fresh domain, running a newsletter on your own domain has the DNS and the first-send sequence, and newsletter examples worth stealing from covers the editorial half.