Privacy

The Timeline Times is a weekly newspaper of posts written by builders on X. The paper is free to read, there are no accounts, and the only personal information it holds is the email address of someone who asked for the Sunday email.

Who runs it

The paper is operated as The Timeline Times. You can reach a person at sunday@timelinetimes.com, and that address is read.

What is collected

If you subscribe to the Sunday email, the paper stores:

• your email address, lowercased;
• when you asked, and when you confirmed;
• when a confirmation email was last sent to you, so you cannot be mailed repeatedly;
• a short-lived record of the inbox a confirmation email went to, cleared out as routine housekeeping rather than kept indefinitely — this is what stops one inbox from being mailed repeatedly, even across several similar addresses;
• the delivery id the mail provider returns for that message, so a specific send can be traced;
• if you unsubscribe, the date you did.

Nothing else. No name, no address, no payment details, and no advertising or analytics trackers anywhere on the site. Reading the paper collects nothing at all.

What you agreed to

The sentence shown beside the signup form is the whole of it: “You're subscribing to the free Sunday email; unsubscribe any time.” The record of that agreement is the pair of timestamps above — when you asked, and when you clicked the link in the confirmation email. Nobody is added to the list without that second click.

Who else touches it

Three companies process this data on the paper’s behalf, and no one else sees it. It is never sold, rented, or shared for anyone’s marketing:

• Supabase, which hosts the database the list lives in;
• Resend, which delivers the email;
• Vercel, which runs the website.

How long it is kept

A confirmed subscriber’s address is kept until they unsubscribe. An address that was submitted but never confirmed is deleted after 30 days — if somebody typed a stranger’s address into the form, it does not sit here indefinitely.

An unsubscribed address is kept, and kept only, so that the Sunday email is never sent to it again. One exception, and it is the only one: if that address is entered into the signup form again, it is treated as a fresh request and gets one confirmation email — which does nothing unless somebody clicks the link in it. Nothing else can put a removed address back on the list, and if you would rather the address were deleted outright than kept as a do-not-mail record, ask and it will be.

Getting off the list

Every Sunday email carries an unsubscribe link, and it works without signing in to anything; the confirmation email needs none — ignore it and nothing happens. You can also write to sunday@timelinetimes.com and ask, or ask for your address to be deleted outright rather than suppressed. Either is fine, and neither needs a reason.

If this changes

The Sunday email is editorial and carries no advertising today. If that ever changes — a sponsor line, an affiliate link, anything sold — this page and the footer of the email change with it, before the first such message goes out, not after.