We are using mailchimp as newsletter service so the archived mails will be hosted on their servers, not ours.

However, we can embedded the links to the archive mails directly on our site.
Just follow these instructions and copy / paste the HTML code at the bottom of the Newsletter page.

In T2451#45438, @anlambert wrote:

Just follow these instructions and copy / paste the HTML code at the bottom of the Newsletter page.

Thanks for the link: actually we would like to go for the "Host your own archive" option.

A bare bone process may be something like this:

• every time a newsletter is sent Marla does the following
  • get the HTML of the newsletter from Mailchimp
  • use it to create a new page on the SWH website
  • add a link to this new page at the bottom of the newsletter page on SWH (in all three languages)

This way the subscription page is also the archive page and may attract more traffic.

Any comments/improvements on this?

A bare bone process may be something like this:

• every time a newsletter is sent Marla does the following
  • get the HTML of the newsletter from Mailchimp
  • use it to create a new page on the SWH website
  • add a link to this new page at the bottom of the newsletter page on SWH (in all three languages)

This way the subscription page is also the archive page and may attract more traffic.

Any comments/improvements on this?

This sounds quite complicated and cumbersome to do ... We need a process that requires less copy / paste operations.

Possible solutions are:

• We create the newsletter for each supported languages and send it directly from WordPress through the Newsletter plugin.

• We keep using mailchimp to create the newsletter and print each mail to a PDF file. This works really well when using Chromium browser, see
  Welcome to the Software Heritage Newsletter!.pdf3 MBDownload
  as an example. Apart the top mailchimp bar to remove, the PDF rendering looks great. We can then upload the PDF to our main site and offers a link to it in the Newsletter page. This way the only thing to maintain will be an archive table in the Newsletter page containing link to pdf files.

In T2451#45441, @anlambert wrote:

A bare bone process may be something like this:

• every time a newsletter is sent Marla does the following
  • get the HTML of the newsletter from Mailchimp
  • use it to create a new page on the SWH website
  • add a link to this new page at the bottom of the newsletter page on SWH (in all three languages)

This way the subscription page is also the archive page and may attract more traffic.

Any comments/improvements on this?

This sounds quite complicated and cumbersome to do ... We need a process that requires less copy / paste operations.

Possible solutions are:

• We create the newsletter for each supported languages and send it directly from WordPress through the Newsletter plugin.

• We keep using mailchimp to create the newsletter and print each mail to a PDF file. This works really well when using Chromium browser, see
  Welcome to the Software Heritage Newsletter!.pdf3 MBDownload
  as an example. Apart the top mailchimp bar to remove, the PDF rendering looks great. We can then upload the PDF to our main site and offers a link to it in the Newsletter page. This way the only thing to maintain will be an archive table in the Newsletter page containing link to pdf files.

This seems an interesting alternative, but I am not convinced about the PDF only option.
Before going there, we need to really compare features: may you check with Marla?

Copying and pasting mailchimp HTML to our Wordpress site does not render nicely (see here) as stylesheets are not taken into account (even if I integrate them with a WP plugin). Plus I had to manually remove some HTML code.

Is it really an issue to host the archive on mailchimp ? I mean this seems a reliable service.

In T2451#45441, @anlambert wrote:

Possible solutions are:

• We create the newsletter for each supported languages and send it directly from WordPress through the Newsletter plugin.

(It looks like you're considering other options first, but just for the record): NACK on sending the newsletter ourselves. It's just too much of a hassle to do that at scale in the current "geopolitics" of bulk email sending. Keeping good reputation and all that is really hard, and we really want to offload that part of the job to someone else. Which of course doesn't mean we shouldn't archive the sent newsletters ourselves, so I'm leaving that part of the conversation to others :-)

In T2451#45538, @zack wrote:

In T2451#45441, @anlambert wrote:

Possible solutions are:

• We create the newsletter for each supported languages and send it directly from WordPress through the Newsletter plugin.

(It looks like you're considering other options first, but just for the record): NACK on sending the newsletter ourselves. It's just too much of a hassle to do that at scale in the current "geopolitics" of bulk email sending. Keeping good reputation and all that is really hard, and we really want to offload that part of the job to someone else. Which of course doesn't mean we shouldn't archive the sent newsletters ourselves, so I'm leaving that part of the conversation to others :-)

Ack, that was not my preferred option anyway. I still think archiving the newsletter to PDF files is a nice tradeoff if we want to self host it. Plus there is a lot of javascript code embedded in mailchimp generated HTML ...

Mailchimp is closed source (*sigh*) but is well accepted and has interesting features, so we'll not move away unless there are strong reasons.
Ack for the PDF way, as it seems the HTML one is too fragile/cumbersome.