Newsletter

It is stored to send you the newsletter and for nothing else. Not enriched, not matched against anything, not passed to a third party, and never sold or rented.

Nothing tracks whether you opened it. There is no tracking pixel and no wrapped link reporting a click back to us. This costs real information — we cannot tell which issues land — and it is the correct trade for a publication that spends its pages objecting to exactly that practice elsewhere.

One click removes you, from a link in every issue, with no confirmation step and no question about why. The address is deleted rather than suppressed.

The privacy policy covers the rest.

Published because none of it depends on being secret. A defence that only works while nobody knows about it is not a defence, and a reader handing over an address is entitled to know what happens around it.

There is no third-party captcha here, which is a deliberate choice with a cost. A captcha would mean loading a script from another company's domain — the exact practice this site refuses everywhere else — and the visual kind is defeated by human solving services for less than a dollar per thousand while reliably obstructing readers using a screen reader.

1. 1. Confirmation before anything

   Your address does nothing until you click a link sent to it. Nobody can add somebody else, and an automated signup achieves nothing, because the confirmation lands with whoever owns the address rather than with whoever typed it.

2. 2. A signed ticket

   The page requests a short-lived token when it loads, and the server refuses any submission without a valid one. This stops the common case: a bot that finds the endpoint and posts to it directly, never having loaded the form.

3. 3. A clock

   The token carries the moment the server issued it. A submission arriving under three seconds later was not typed by a person, and one arriving twelve hours later has expired.

4. 4. A field you cannot see

   There is a decoy input hidden from browsers and screen readers alike. Anything that fills it is automated, and that submission is discarded without scoring.

5. 5. No links, at all

   A signup needs no URL, so any URL is treated as a strong signal. Shorteners, link markup and the vocabulary of link-buying score heavily, and text hiding behind zero-width characters or lookalike Cyrillic letters is normalised before any of it is checked.

6. 6. Header injection is refused outright

   A line break or an extra recipient in any field is not spam but an attempt to turn the form into a relay. Those submissions are rejected without scoring and without a distinguishable response.

The checks run on the server, not in your browser. Anything running only in the page is decoration, since an automated client never executes it. The same filter is applied to every form on this site, and it is itself covered by an automated test that feeds it real junk mail and real messages and fails if it gets either wrong.