Custom newsletters

Your app already produces everything a good newsletter needs. Editors publish stories, members comment, people post their own content, polls fill up. tchop lets you turn that activity into newsletters on any schedule, keeps track of who agreed to receive which newsletter, and works with the email tool you already use.

This article covers how the pieces fit together. Your tchop contact can share the technical setup guide (org config, webhook signature, sync API) with your developers.

Build newsletters from what happens in your app

A newsletter that only repeats your latest articles is easy to ignore. The sends people open tend to mix editorial picks with what the community is talking about: the most discussed story of the week, a sharp reader comment, a member's post, the result of a poll.

For pulling that material together we recommend the tchop MCP server. MCP is the standard way AI agents connect to software, and through it an agent can read cards, mixes, comments, user-generated posts and engagement data from your app. You decide the rhythm: a daily briefing, a weekly digest, a match-day edition, or a monthly roundup for a specific channel.

A typical setup looks like this:

• The agent pulls the week's top editorial cards from one or more channels.

• It adds the most active discussions and two or three standout comments.

• It drops the content into your newsletter template and hands you a draft to review.

Nothing is sent until an editor on your team approves the draft, and you can change the selection or the wording before that.

Templates agents can build and test

Newsletter templates are written as React Email components. AI agents write React well, so they can create a new template, adjust an existing one to your brand, fill it with real content from your app and render a test version in minutes. You review the result in your inbox before anything goes out.

Once a template is approved, it is compiled into static HTML with placeholders. At send time only the content changes, so the layout stays stable from edition to edition.

Link to anything, including the conversation

Every element in a tchop newsletter can link straight back into the app. That includes articles and videos, but also places where readers take part:

• a comment thread under a story

• a specific poll, so readers vote with one tap

• a member's post or an event page

Most newsletters exist to bring readers back into the app, and a link into a running discussion does that better than a link to an article. Someone who lands under a story with forty replies tends to read a few and add one.

Consent management is built in

tchop stores newsletter consent for every user: who subscribed to which list, when, from where, and which consent text they agreed to. Each change is kept in an append-only history, so you can show proof of consent later if you need to.

Several newsletters per organisation

You can run up to 20 newsletter lists in one organisation, for example a weekly digest, a breaking-news alert and a members-only update. For each list you set:

• a name and short description users see in the app

• the consent text, naming your organisation as the sender

• a consent text version, which is stored with every opt-in

• the policy: opt-in (users must actively subscribe) or opt-out (users are subscribed by default and can leave with one tap)

Which policy applies to a list is a legal decision on your side. Switching a list from opt-in to opt-out later subscribes everyone without a stored choice, so treat it as a legal change, not a setting.

Ask at sign-up, and any time after

When newsletters are switched on, new users see a consent step during onboarding. Existing users can be asked later through an in-app message with a call to action that opens the newsletter settings directly. That works well after a relaunch, when you add a new list, or when you want to promote a newsletter to an engaged audience.

Users stay in control

Every user can change their choices at any time under Settings, then Newsletter, in the web app and in the mobile apps. Declining a newsletter never limits access to the app. If someone leaves your organisation, is banned or deactivates their account, tchop unsubscribes them from all lists automatically.

Send with tchop or with your own tool

You choose how newsletters are delivered. There are two ways to do it.

Let tchop handle sending

If you would rather not deal with email infrastructure, sending is part of our service. tchop delivers your newsletters through established providers such as Brevo or Postmark, using our own accounts. You do not need a contract, a sender setup or a separate login with any of them. Your readers get a newsletter from your brand, and consent, unsubscribes and delivery are handled for you.

Use your own email tool

Many organisations already run newsletters in their own tool, such as Brevo, Postmark or a similar service, and often collect subscribers on their website too. That setup can stay as it is. tchop supplies the content and the consent data, and your tool does the sending.

Consent stays in sync in both directions

When you use your own tool, tchop keeps both sides aligned:

• A user unsubscribes in the app. tchop sends a signed webhook to your system right away, so your email tool stops sending to that person.

• A user clicks unsubscribe in an email. Your email tool reports the change to tchop through our sync API, and the toggle in the app flips off.

Both directions are push-based, so changes arrive within seconds rather than on the next nightly import. Users are matched by a stable ID pair (tchop user ID and the contact ID in your tool), not by email address, so a changed email does not break the link. When both sides change at the same time, the most recent change wins.

Getting started

Newsletter consent and the webhook are configured per organisation by tchop or your org admin. To set it up, tell us which lists you want, their consent texts and policies, and whether we should send for you or connect your own email tool. We will set it up and run a test before anything goes live.