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5dayemail

5dayemail — publish a 5-day email course

An email course is a short, finite sequence: five to ten lessons, one a day, delivered to an inbox in the order you wrote them. It works because it is finite. A newsletter asks a stranger to subscribe to something with no end, while a course asks for five mornings and says what arrives on each of them, so the decision is small and the ending is a real moment rather than an unsubscribe.

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Free to start, no card. Sign in with Google and write day one.

A sample course, “Write a sentence people finish”, two mornings in.

The daily rhythm is what does the work. A reader who opened day two is far more likely to open day three, and by day five your name in a From line is familiar rather than unexpected. Nothing else you can write earns that in a week.

A finite course is also honest about what it costs someone. You are asking for five to ten mornings, not an open-ended place in an inbox, and a reader who finishes has actually finished something. That is the moment worth designing for, and it is why the length here is capped at ten emails rather than sold as a bigger number on a bigger plan.

How it works

  1. Write between five and ten emails

    Each day is one email: a subject line, the preview line most inboxes show beside it, and a body you write in a rich text editor with headings, lists, quotes, links and images. You reorder days by moving them up and down. Nothing about sequences, triggers or branching logic ever appears, because a course that goes out one day at a time does not need any of it.

  2. Publish, and you get a page to send people to

    Publishing gives you a hosted opt-in page at 5dayemail.com/c/your-course with your headline, your description and one form, plus a snippet that puts the same form on your own site. There is no domain to verify and no sending account to set up before your first reader arrives.

  3. Every reader confirms, then gets one lesson a day

    A new address receives one confirmation email and nothing else until it is clicked. Day one follows the confirmation rather than waiting for the next morning: at once, unless the address had another course’s email in the last twelve hours, or the account’s daily sending limit or the queue already due ahead of it holds it. Each following day arrives on the next calendar day in the reader’s own timezone, at the hour you chose for the course between 06:00 and 21:00 local.

A stamp for every first

Your account keeps a stamp sheet. The first stamp is for publishing a course, the next for your first confirmed reader, then one for the first reader who reaches the last day, and one each at ten and a hundred readers. Readers collect their own: one stamp for every day they mark complete, and a sealed certificate at the end.

The first one is yours when you publish.

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What you write in

One editor, one day of the course at a time. There is no canvas, no automation graph and nothing to configure before you can write the first sentence.

  • Headings, bold, italic, bullet and numbered lists, quotes, code and links, written in the page rather than in a separate window
  • Images you drag in, resized and converted on your machine before they are uploaded, so a 6MB photo does not become a 6MB email
  • A subject line and a preview line for every day, edited next to the body they belong to
  • Every save is a new version, kept forever, so editing day four tomorrow cannot rewrite the day four that went out this morning
  • A check at publish time that renders the real email and refuses it if it is too large to arrive intact or uses layout Outlook cannot draw
  • A course you can pause and resume without losing anyone’s place in it

Confirmed opt-in is not a setting here

Every creator on this platform sends from the same domain, so one careless list damages everyone else’s delivery. That is the reason for the rules below, and it is also why none of them has a switch. They are enforced by the database, not by a preference you could turn off at two in the morning.

  • An address that has not clicked its confirmation link receives exactly one message, ever — the confirmation itself
  • The exact sentence a reader agreed to is stored with the date, the address, the IP and the browser, so the record of consent is the wording they actually saw
  • One-click unsubscribe on every message, in the headers your mail client reads and as a visible link in the footer, honoured the moment it is pressed
  • Unsubscribing ends that course the moment it is pressed, and no import can add the reader back to it; the same page also offers to stop mail from the whole platform, permanently, for a reader who wants that instead
  • A sender name and a postal address are required before a course can be published, because a course email without them is a message no inbox should trust
  • Sending volume ramps over three weeks for every new account rather than starting wide open
  • No open tracking. Apple Mail fetches a tracking pixel whether or not anyone read anything, so an open is not a number worth collecting

Guides to writing an email course

What a first course needs, from the promise to the software that sends it. Building a list, welcome sequences, lead magnets, five-day challenges and deliverability each have their own guides on the guides index.

Questions

How long can a course be?
Between five and ten emails. That is a fixed ceiling, not a limit that lifts on a larger plan. A course that ends is a course people finish, and ten mornings is already a great deal to ask of a stranger.
When does day one arrive?
Right after the reader confirms, usually within a minute. An address that received another course’s email in the last twelve hours waits until that gap ends, and the confirmation page names the time. Every account can send only a limited number of emails a day, confirmations included, and a new account’s limit rises over its first three weeks, so after a big launch some readers wait for day 1, and the confirmation page tells them so. Day two arrives on the next calendar day at the send hour you picked for the course, in the reader’s own timezone, and so on to the last day.
Is confirmed opt-in optional?
No. Every address confirms before it receives anything but the confirmation email, on every path onto a list, and there is no setting anywhere that changes that. The rule is enforced by a database constraint rather than by application code.
Who does the email come from?
Your sender name, on a dedicated course-sending domain kept separate from the domain that sends sign-in and account mail, with your own address as the reply-to. Replies go straight to you and are never read here.
Do you track opens?
No, and there is no switch for it. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads tracking pixels on behalf of readers who never opened anything, so the resulting percentage looks like information without being any. Nothing here records who opened what.
Can I import a list I already have?
Yes, as a re-permission campaign rather than as a transfer. Paste the list or pick a file, say where the consent came from, and every address on it enters as pending and receives one confirmation email and nothing else. Nobody joins a course without clicking that link, so the list you end up with is the part of your old one that still wants to hear from you.
What happens when someone unsubscribes?
That course ends the moment they press it: its remaining days are cancelled in the same request, a one-click unsubscribe from a mail client included, and no import can add them back to it. The same page also offers to stop mail from the whole platform, permanently, for a reader who wants that instead. An address is suppressed platform-wide only then, or when it hard-bounces, is reported as spam, or is erased on request.
Can I edit a day after the course is live?
Yes. Every save writes a new version and nothing overwrites an old one, and a day already handed to the mail provider keeps the version it was sent with. Readers who have not reached that day yet get the new one.
Do readers get a certificate when they finish?
Yes. Each lesson email has a button to mark that day done; pressing it opens the day on a page of its own and prints a stamp on the reader’s sheet, one for each day they mark. When the last day has been sent, the reader has a page listing every day of the course and a certificate at an address of its own that they can share. It is a record of a finished course, or a certificate of completion if they marked every day. It names the course and you, never the reader, because no name is ever asked for.
Can it write the course for me?
It can draft one from something you already wrote. Paste a post, a talk or your notes and a language model cuts it into five days in the language you wrote in, each with one idea and one thing to do, using only what you pasted. Every drafted day starts with a line you delete once you have read it, so nothing goes out unread. The text is sent to Anthropic to write the draft and is not stored. You can try it on the email course outline generator without an account.
What does it cost?
Nothing on the Free plan, which runs 1 course for up to 500 readers. The paid plan is $19 a month, with any tax that applies where you are already inside that figure, for 50 courses and up to 50,000 readers each. Nothing is charged per subscriber or per email, and nothing is taken from what you sell to your readers.
Can I sign up today?
Yes. Sign in with Google and your account opens straight away on the Free plan; there is no form to fill in, no card to enter and no waiting list. The paid plan starts only if you choose it.

Free to start, no card. Sign in with Google and write day one.

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