I Shot the Email

With apologies to Bob Marley.

I shot the email, but I didn’t shoot no web POSSE, oh, no, oh

Yesterday I killed the cto4.ai newsletter: deleted the Beehiiv account, tore the subscribe forms out of this site, swept the DNS. But I’m still all-in on POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This site stays the canonical home for everything I write, the RSS feed still works, and teasers still flow out to LinkedIn. Email was just one syndication channel.

It’s the one that needed shooting.

I shot the email, the email, but I swear it was in self-defense, oh, no

Everything about the email channel proved to be a shitshow. The DMARC-DKIM-SPF deliverability tax. A dedicated sending subdomain. Seven Cloudflare DNS records whose only job was making email deliverable. And subscriber bots, which it turns out have solved Cloudflare Turnstile, the “prove you’re human” checkbox that was supposed to keep them out.

The bots confused me at first. Why does a subscribe bot even exist? What’s the payoff for fake-subscribing to a small AI blog’s newsletter? The answer is list-bombing: bots sign a victim’s harvested corporate email address up to thousands of newsletters at once, drowning their inbox (handy for burying, say, a fraud alert or a password-reset notice). My subscribe form wasn’t the target. It was ammunition.

For a while there, I thought the newsletter was succeeding. I’d look at the subscriber chart — up and to the right — and think: wow, it’s taking off!

Up and to the right. The dashed line is the humans.

Up and to the right. The dashed line is the humans.

Nope. That takeoff starts May 22, the day the bots cracked Turnstile: 2,089 fake signups in 53 days, about 39 per day. And this was round two: the first bot wave, back in 2025, swelled the list to nearly 2,000, which is what got Turnstile installed in the first place. Turnstile worked — until May. (Round one predates the chart.) Real humans: roughly 214, flat since launch, of whom about 15 (besides me) ever clicked a link. Even the “opens” were largely datacenter scanners; Boydton, Virginia is an Azure data center, not a fan. I sent six issues, ever, the last in early April.

So I shot, I shot, I shot it down, oh, no, oh

Run those numbers and the verdict writes itself: not even close to worth it, and no reason to let it linger and suffer. So it’s dead, and it took some friends with it: the subscribe pop-up and widgets that defaced this site (952 lines gone; every page is cleaner and faster now), the seven DNS records, the Beehiiv account, the 971 junk contacts the bots had pumped into my Attio CRM, and the standing chore of fighting subscriber bots.

It was worth having done, though. I learned a lot: about email’s deliverability plumbing, about why subscriber bots exist, and about how much skepticism a growth chart deserves.

Rest in peace, email channel. Want to follow along? RSS, LinkedIn, or just come by the site. That’s the POSSE part, and it’s doing fine.