Joyful January 2026 Recap

Happy (very) belated New Year’s!

January has been a blast building Joyful and iterating with users!

This month there has been a mix of quality-of-life updates and others that help merge the email and web versions as well as more protections put in place that protect Joyful’s deliverability high against bad actors.

Let’s talk about what is new in this new year!

If you’re interested in reading last month’s updates, check it out here 👉 Joyful 2025 Recap

Emails need to look good 🤌

At its core, Joyful should take your writing and make it easy to get emails out looking beautiful.

Some of Joyful’s users have been using it for music and linking YouTube videos. So, while the naked link could be just fine, it’s arguably better presentation to have the thumbnail present that you can click on to go watch.

So, now when you have a YouTube/Spotify/Apple Music link, it will autodetect that link and paste in a thumbnail that will render great in the email.

Switching should be easy

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle in the newsletter space with a certain platform cough Substack cough hosting people that aren’t all that great.

So, now you can switch from Substack easily using the dedicated tool. It’ll take the zip file that you get when you export your data from Substack and add the newsletters & subscribers to Joyful. Maybe 5 minutes — max.

Import tools from other platforms are in the works and I’ll be sure to write about those when they’re live.

Let your readers reach out to you

Replies are probably something that should have been a day-one inclusion, but oftentimes writers want to send and have a separate email in the newsletter that their readers can send messages to.

Now, Joyful automatically sets your email as the Reply-To email or you can use the reply tracking function which will let you mask your email (something like reply+abcdef12345@r.joyful.to) and, in a future update, track who replies and which types of posts people often reply to.

RSS Feeds

All of your publications are now RSS-feed-compatible to help you reach your readers however they like! Your main page has an RSS combining all of your publications, with each individual publication having its own RSS feed!

Super handy!

That’s all for today — it’s been a great month and I’m looking forward to what February will bring! If you want to see the whole feature list of what Joyful has to offer, check out the docs. There is also an active changelog so you can see what is being added nearly every day!

Cheers,
Ian