How do I subscribe old users to a new newsletter

Using Ghost
1

[Some of this is repeated in this feature request post, but I’m posting it here as well as I need help solving a particular problem.]

I recently moved an old newsletter from MailChimp to my two-year-old Ghost installation, as a second newsletter. I moved about 1400 subscribers, 400 of which were already members of my main Ghost newsletter (we’ll call that one Newsletter #1). I turned on “Subscribe new members on signup” for the new newsletter (Newsletter #2), so that all the imported subscribers would get auto-subscribed. I didn’t realize that any subscriber who was already in my system wouldn’t get subscribed to Newsletter #2. (Which is documented here, I now see.) So now when I sent out the next issue of Newsletter #2, it only went to 1000 recipients, not 1400.

It’s not a huge deal that those 400 people missed this issue. But I’d like to subscribe them for the next one. How do I do it?

According to the documentation, there’s no way, when importing, to change the subscription state of any member who’s already in the system. So do I have to go directly into the database to fix this? Or is there a simpler way I’m not thinking of?

Thanks!
-Sandy

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You can use Ghost Admin API to subscribe the 400 members. The process involves filtering and exporting the 400 members to get the their IDs, then using the “update member” API with the id to subscribe.
You can refer to the following doc for more API detail:

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GitHub - TryGhost/gctools: Command line utilities for working with Ghost content is useful for some bulk changes that use the admin API, and it has a subscribe members to newsletter feature.

You can target a specific newsletter to subscribe to, and filter members based on a label. If the set of members doesn’t already have a clear label, you can run some filters in the admin member area, and then apply a new label to that set.

Once installed, use interactive mode gctools i for ease of use.

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Thanks! I didn’t know about either of these methods — they look like they’ll be exactly what I need.

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