Blog

In a previous post, I looked at the tracking links of three major email newsletter providers and deconstructed two of them. The third, Substack/Mailgun, stubbornly resisted deciphering. Until now.

This investigation into email tracking attempts to deconstruct tracking links and pixels and highlight the data that is being collected. It covers Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Substack and other Mailgun retailers.

My preferred email newsletter provider is Buttondown but when I set up my newsletter Interesting Things, I chose Substack. However, after two weeks, the warm glow of Substack had subsided and I moved it over to Buttondown. Here’s the story.

I recently launched a Substack newsletter and was disappointed to discover that Substack didn’t support markdown. I write a lot of text and markdown is my preferred format. It would be nice if Substack could integrate into my workflow. Well, maybe it can. I discovered a way to use markdown with Substack. …

As I alluded in my status update, I’ve been setting up an email newsletter. Finally it’s ready and I posted the first issue last Friday. I’ve named it Interesting Things because it’s a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie business, science, and adjacents. Basically, stuff …

Sorry, I stopped blogging for a while. Astute readers will have noticed that I haven’t posted any original blog posts for a few weeks. I’ve been irregularly posting Reading Lists instead. Reason? I’m tinkering with setting up an email newsletter of curated links. I do a lot of reading every week and I …

Following up on my previous post, I’d like to announce that email-untracker (or Untracker for short) is now available. You can now run Untracker (on your own self-hosted mail server) for yourself and your friends. Get rid of tracking links and pixels in email newsletters without compromising your own privacy. Or …

Two weeks ago, I switched to using a proportional font for editing markdown text. I’ve been using vscode’s inbuilt markdown previewer a lot. Continually staring at it’s proportionally spaced output probably triggered a flash of inspiration. I figured markdown in a more readable font would be a nicer …

Been reading into sponsorware to see how it could be used to fund open source. Here’s a bunch of links arranged in a semi-timeline.

Previously A few weeks ago, I wrote Email Cleaner and started using it to clean tracking links and pixels from my email newsletters. It works well. I can hover over links (or long press for touch devices) and see the URL. I can click on them without being tracked. I can protect myself from phishing. When I announced …