The Dot Club newsletter will now be counting opens and clicks by default. Big whoop, I hear you say, since this is considered standard practice for email newsletters. But I’d turned it off in April 2022 and have been on the fence about it since, only turning it on over Aug–Dec of this year to do some email housekeeping.

Which went well, by the way. I learned a few lessons that made me more comfortable about the non-gross type of tracking.

Grab a cup of tea and enjoy the full story. Or scroll to the end if you just want a summary.

Why I turned off tracking

I don’t like tracking. I’ve seen it done badly too many times to count. I’ve even worked for people who believed companies should collect as much data as possible about “the audience”, in case they could “use it later”.

Now that I'm a bit (a lot) older and more willing to question conventional wisdom, I’m pretty sure their line of thinking is kind of catastrophic. Even if clever security folks could neutralise the threat of data theft, tracking All The Things still requires a great deal of effort, hard drive space, and energy that most likely goes to waste.

From Wholegrain Digital’s Digital Declutter for Businesses: Digital Marketing:

All the information that we exchange online is data. The further the data travel, the more energy they consume. A study conducted as part of an investigation by Channel 4’s “Dispatches” current affairs program found out that a single Instagram post from Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo to his 240 million followers consumes as much energy as ten UK households for one year! Although most of us don’t have the same outreach as Cristiano Ronaldo, all our digital activities have small carbon footprints that add up to the global issue.

Data have become the new gold. However, not everyone knows how to use them properly. Many businesses set up tracking throughout their websites but rarely actually look into the collected data, understand what they mean, and make any necessary changes. So if you collect data on your website but don’t have any use for them, consider switching off that tracking. The fewer data we collect, the less energy we consume.

Anyway, I panicked. I switched to an email provider who would let me turn off tracking AND create a minimalist email to reduce the unnecessary kilobytes I was shooting across the world.

Finding that kind of provider in early 2022 was not a straightforward job, but I needed time to think about the purpose of what I do; which “standard practices” are legitimately standard (and which ones only exist cos some random internet man said so); and what my actions and decisions as an indie author and small business owner mean to me.

(By the way, this is the same panic that drove me to adopt the practice of retiring blog posts.)

Why I’m turning it back on

The last few months taught me a few things, namely where my boundaries are, which of my assumptions were too over-the-top, and what activities are probably safe enough to practice.

I turned tracking on from August to December (and included a note about it in each issue), and used the stats to figure out if the outcome of my actions aligned with my values.

This housekeeping project revealed 2 things:

First was that I was sending a lot of unnecessary emails, about 500 each month, to subscribers who weren’t actually interested in hearing from me. I suspect most were bots, people’s old email addresses, and freebie tasters who just forgot to unsubscribe.

If a standard email costs the equivalent of 4g of CO2 (about a teaspoon of sugar), that means I’ve been throwing five Starbucks “Grande” cups of sugar in the air, every month, for no good reason. Except it’s not sugar, it’s carbon dioxide at a time where environmentalists are telling us to ease up on excess emissions. Sorry, Planet Earth, this was not the plan.

The second revelation was that turning on tracking DIDN’T suddenly hook me up to creepy levels of personal information as part of some adtech hellscape situation. I’ve realised there’s a world of difference between light, purpose-driven tracking and the awful mess of surveillance capitalism that oozes over social media and the modern web.

All I wanted was enough info to make Dot Club function better, no more, no less. And I got exactly that. It all seems obvious now, in hindsight, but I really was worried and didn’t want to just carry on without stopping to think about it.

I did a big declutter on Dot Club, wished it had been done sooner, and now feel safer about adopting light, purposeful tracking as standard practice. The plan is to keep a better eye on things and ensure the Club stays tidy.

The journey and the destination

Hey, it means a lot to me that you read this whole post. After deleting my social media accounts in 2022, I did a lot of thinking and reading. Anyone who’s followed my newsletter, chatted to me over email or text, or even discussed in person the state of technology and its impact on us, will know I’ve been down a bunch of unusual rabbit holes. It feels good to be able to share what I've learned.

I realise this Dot Club development makes me that guy who walks into a shoe shop, tries on every pair, then walks out in what I came in with. But I’m okay with that. Needing to understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing is it one of my personal fixations. And I’m grateful for everyone walking that path of discovery alongside me.

So, thank you 💖

Oh yeah, about that email provider

By the way, the email provider I switched to was EmailOctopus (referral link, ahoy!). Their free plan offers almost everything their paid plan does, just with smaller limits, unlike just about every other provider at the time I switched.

This meant I could do the darkmode thing for photosensitive readers (hello, ND friends), offer a plain-text equivalent for people who prefer reading lo-fi emails (hello, terminal friends), and road test the entire EmailOctopus product against a variety of circumstances over a long period of time. That’s a genuine test, as far as I’m concerned. And when I was finally in a position to sign up for a paid plan, I had no doubt that I was getting value for my money.

On top of that, I felt good about signing up with them. EmailOctopus is a bootstrapped startup, meaning their funding comes from the company owners instead of outside investors, so their decisions provide value first and foremost to their customers, not to some rich shareholders.

And, so importantly, they care about ethics and sustainability. They actively contribute to ocean cleanup and emission reduction, and invest in carbon removal. I mean, I hope it’s not one big PR greenwashing scam, and their use of certain notorious tech giants makes me go hmm.

But there aren't many workable alternatives in the land of email, so for now these guys are the best fit for my requirements. I’ve been with EmailOctopus for almost two years now and feel satisfied with my choice.

The tl;dr for anyone who skipped …

• Dot Club stopped counting opens and clicks in April 2022 after I freaked out about sustainability and surveillance capitalism.
• I did not like tracking before, because I had seen people do it badly and carelessly, and was worried that was the only way to go about it.
• A housekeeping project (involving light, purposeful tracking) revealed I was sending 500 unnecessary emails each month, producing the equivalent of 2kg of CO2 emissions for no good reason. What a mess!
• I learned that light tracking can be helpful AND it doesn’t oblige you to do creepy tracking.
• Dot Club will now resume counting opens and clicks so I can keep things tidy.

EDIT 04/01/2024: Edits for easier reading.