The Week, in your inbox

There is no Mailchimp account behind this, no Substack, no beehiiv. The subscribe form posts to a small service we wrote, the list is an append-only file on a machine we control, and the issues are rendered and addressed by our own sender — all of it in newsletter/. The one outside part is the last one: a mail relay accepts each finished message and delivers it, because sending from our own machine would mean worse deliverability, not more independence. It never sees the list, only the message in front of it, and swapping it is one line of configuration.

• Double opt-in. Subscribing sends one confirmation email. Ignore it and nothing further is ever sent — an unconfirmed address is dropped, not kept warm.
• What is stored. Your address, the page you subscribed from, the timestamps, and a salted hash of the IP that submitted the form (kept for rate-limiting, never reversible to you). If your mail server ever rejects an issue, the rejection and its reason are recorded too, so we stop sending rather than hammering a dead mailbox. Nothing else: no name field, no company enrichment, no profile.
• No tracking. No open pixel, no click-wrapped links, no per-reader identifiers in URLs. We cannot tell whether you opened an issue, which is the point. The only numbers we have are how many people are on the list and how many messages the mail servers refused. Where the relay offers to report opens and clicks, that reporting is switched off and the code ignores those events anyway.
• One-click unsubscribe. Every issue carries a signed unsubscribe link and the List-Unsubscribe headers your mail client uses for its own unsubscribe button. One request removes you; no confirmation flow, no "are you sure", no exit survey.
• Never shared. The list is not sold, rented, swapped, uploaded as a custom audience, or used to look you up anywhere else. The relay that delivers the mail is handed one message at a time, never the list.

Note. This build has no capture endpoint configured, so the form above is not live yet. The RSS feed carries every issue in the meantime, and newsletter/README.md documents how the endpoint gets switched on.