536 Rows, 33 Readers

Pulled the subscriber table this week. 536 rows. Thirty-three of them get this.

I mail the people who clicked confirm. Everyone else typed an address into a box and left. I used to look at 536 and think, huh, not bad for a thing I barely promote. Then I actually dug deeper.

A chunk of it is garbage you can smell. Gmail addresses with a dozen dots in them - Gmail ignores dots, so whoever's dumping stolen lists mutates one address into a hundred. Phone numbers at txt.att.net. AOL. Hotmail that has not been opened in my lifetime, possibly. Easy laughs.

The rest look real. And that's a real problem.

Company domain, firstname.lastname, perfectly sendable, sits next to the thirty-three like it belongs there. And then, every once in a while, the person writes me. Not a rage-unsubscribe. A heads-up. Their inbox got scooped up, some script is stuffing the address into every subscribe form on the internet, and they'd rather I knew before I added to the pile. I had a good chuckle, this was fun. Also: that row is a human. They never asked for my mails. If I trusted the database, well, I'd never know.

You might see where this is going...

I don't send until they click the link I mailed them. Double opt-in, the setting everyone turns off because it "kills conversion." Conversion to what? A folder of people who will spam-button you into a hole. Kill your product, let Google know you're toxic. Bots don't click. Stolen inboxes mostly don't either. The thirty-three did. That's who I want.

Opens are a separate circus.

Apple has been preloading the whole email through a proxy since 2021, so the tracking pixel fires whether anyone looked or not. Corporate antivirus opens everything "just in case." I have sat with people celebrating a 60% open rate on mail nobody read. I don't put a pixel in these anyway (no tracking, on purpose). I still wouldn't trust yours.

A click has to go somewhere, though. Confirm. Open the post. Press the thing. Machines will fetch an image. They will not bother with a round trip that looks like intent. So if you'd bet money on a number, make sure the number's real. Leave it in a channel that is scraped and you'll make decisions off Google's spiders.

Think on this a bit longer if you run a product.

Your signup count is my 536. "Active users" who created an account and bounced. Opens on the drip campaign. The intern's CSV. Some of it's fake, some of it's a real person who never consented, and the row will not tell you which. I look at other people's dashboards for a living. One of the first questions is which of these actually count, and which are "free". If the answer is most of them, stop counting that.

Thirty-three. Not great, not terrible. They don't bounce, they don't write me to please stop, they actually wanted the mail. I'll take it.