Why anyone still starts a newsletter

A friend asked me last month whether starting a newsletter in 2026 was, and I am quoting, “a bit late”. She had a point. The format has been declared dead roughly once a year since 2018, usually by someone who has just launched one.

Here is the answer I gave her, and the reason this letter exists.

Nobody stands between you and the reader

Every other place you can publish has an intermediary with its own interests. A social platform decides how many of your followers see a post, and that number moves whenever the business model does. A search engine decides whether your page is the answer or the also-ran. A video platform decides what counts as watch time.

Email has none of that. You write an address into a box, the message arrives. There is a spam filter in the middle, and it is a real constraint — we will spend plenty of issues on it — but it is a filter with published rules, not a market. Clear the rules and you are through.

That is the entire argument. It is unglamorous and it has not changed in twenty years, which is exactly why it is worth building on.

The list is yours in a way nothing else is

The second argument is portability. If your sending provider raises its prices, or gets bought, or quietly changes what it will let you say, you export a CSV and go somewhere else. Your readers come with you. Try that with an audience that lives inside somebody else’s app.

This matters less on day one than it does in year three, which is why people skip it. It is also the difference between a project you own and a project you rent.

A list of four hundred people who asked for your writing is worth more than forty thousand followers who were shown it once.

What you are actually signing up for

None of that means it is easy. Running a newsletter is mostly deadlines. The writing is the fun part and it is maybe a third of the work. The rest is:

• Deciding what an issue is, and being consistent enough that readers know what they are getting.
• Getting the thing to render correctly in an email client written in 2003.
• Finding readers without buying them.
• Writing the next one after the one that flopped.

If you want the audience without the deadline, you want a blog. That is a perfectly good thing to want. The reason to choose email is that the deadline is the product: it is what turns “I will write something eventually” into a thing that exists twice a month.

What this newsletter is

Mailer is a letter about the parts of this that nobody writes about. Not growth hacks — there is enough of that. More like: how to end an issue so it does not trail off. What plain text actually does to your open rate. Why your welcome email is doing more work than your last twelve issues combined.

It goes out every other Thursday. The archive is public, there are no paid tiers, and if you want out, the unsubscribe link is at the top and the bottom of every issue.

That is issue one. Next time: why the archive matters more than you think, and what happens when you treat it as a product instead of a backup.