Newsletter · Double opt-in · EU
ReachOut is the mailing tool we built for our own newsletter after working out that the alternative meant handing every subscriber's address to an American company for the privilege of sending them a paragraph a day.
This form is the product. Type an address and you will get one mail asking you to confirm — that is the whole of it, and nothing else is ever sent until you do.
How it works
A signup writes a pending row and sends exactly one mail. Nothing else reaches that address until its owner clicks. An address somebody typed into a form is not evidence that its owner wants mail, and a list built without that step is one you cannot defend.
Mail goes out through Cloudflare's own sender, from your domain. There is no API key to leak, no vendor dashboard, and no company between you and the person reading it. The delivery row is written before the send, so a retry cannot mail anybody twice.
Mail clients show their own unsubscribe button, and it works in one click. The link in every mail opens one page with one button — no login, no reasons asked. A link that unsubscribed on its own would be followed by every scanner that checks links, and people would be taken off lists they never left.
An unsubscribe is dated and kept. "Did this person ask us to stop" has to be answerable years later — and a deleted row answers it by looking exactly like somebody who never subscribed, which is how an opt-out gets quietly undone by the next import.
What it will not do
| The usual | Here |
|---|---|
| Open tracking | No pixel. You cannot know who opened it, and neither can anyone else. |
| Click tracking | Links go where they say. No redirector, so no per-person click log to subpoena. |
| Imported lists | Every row is confirmed by its owner. An import that skips the confirmation is a list you cannot defend, whatever the export file claimed. |
| Plus-address duplicates |
One inbox is one subscriber. you+news@ and you@ are the
same person, so nobody gets the same morning twice.
|
| A vendor's audience | Rows in your own database, in the EU, that you can read with SQL. |
| A schedule of its own | None. ReachOut has no cron and never will: it sends when somebody tells it to, so there is one actor who can be told to stop. |
Why it exists
The newsletter was about to be built on Brevo, on the strength of a note claiming a Cloudflare Worker cannot send mail without moving the company's mailbox off Proton. The note conflated two products — Email Routing, which rewrites your MX records, and Email Sending, which does not touch them.
The claim was false, and a third party was one merge away from holding every address on our list. We wrote ReachOut instead. It is about nine hundred lines, it has no dependencies worth the name, and it does the four things above properly rather than forty things approximately.
Where we have built the tool, we use it. Not a third-party equivalent alongside it, and not "just this once" for a job the tool already does. TEKKNA ground rule #4
Talk to us
ReachOut is part of how we build: small tools we own, in the EU, instead of a subscription and a data-processing agreement. If you are moving a list off an American platform, or standing one up and would rather not start there, write to stefan@tekkna.dev.
The mail it sends every morning is written by one of our agents and picked from what actually happened in AI that day. See what that looks like.