Newsletter & Anti-Spam Terms

This page explains how my email newsletter works: how you join it, what I store, who handles the delivery, and how you get removed. It is written to be honest about what the system does today, not what it might do later. My aim is to meet the standard set by the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) and to give you a clear, no-surprises picture of the whole arrangement.

I am Troy Kelly, an individual based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. There is no company behind this — just me. You can reach me at troy@troykelly.com, which is the only contact channel for anything to do with the newsletter.

For the fuller picture of how I handle personal information across the whole site, see my Privacy Policy.

1. You only receive mail after you confirm (double opt-in)

Joining the newsletter takes two deliberate steps, and nothing is sent to you until you complete both.

• Step one — you ask to join. You enter your email address in the sign-up field. This creates a pending record and triggers a single confirmation email.
• Step two — you confirm. The confirmation email contains a link. Your address is only added to the list once you click that link.

If you never click the link, you receive nothing further. The confirmation link expires after 7 days; an unconfirmed or expired sign-up sits inactive and is not mailed. If you enter an address that is already on the list but not yet confirmed (or one that was removed), the record resets to pending and a fresh confirmation is sent. If you enter an address that is already confirmed, nothing about it changes: it stays confirmed, and a short note is sent to it saying it is already subscribed. That note has no link and needs no action. Either way, re-subscribing never results in duplicate entries, and the sign-up form gives the same response whatever state the address is in.

This is “double opt-in”, and it is how I treat your consent as express and verified under the Spam Act 2003 (Cth): I do not add anyone who has not personally confirmed they want to be there.

2. Who the mail comes from

The newsletter is mine. Troy Kelly, an individual — no organisation, no third-party list broker.

• The address that sends the mail is hello@troykelly.com. That is the “from” address on the confirmation email, handled by my delivery provider (see Section 4).
• The address you contact me on is troy@troykelly.com. Use this for anything you want from me — to be removed, to ask a question, or to raise a concern.

I want to be straightforward about the confirmation email itself: as it is sent today, its content is the subject line and body identifying “troykelly.com” together with the confirmation link. It does not currently spell out my full name or carry a separate contact line inside the message. These terms are where I identify myself as the sender — Troy Kelly — and give you a valid, monitored contact address, so that the identification the Spam Act expects is available to you in writing.

3. Getting removed, corrected, or erased

I want to be completely honest here, because it is the part most sites overstate.

Removal is manual. There is no one-click unsubscribe link, no automatic “unsubscribe” button, and no unsubscribe header in the mail. To come off the list, or to have your record erased entirely, email me at troy@troykelly.com and I will remove or delete your record by hand.

• I do this personally, and I aim to act promptly on any removal request.
• I will not ask you to justify the request. If you want off, you are off.

Correcting your address works the same way. The system has no self-service way to edit a stored address, so the honest fix is either to ask me to remove the old address and add the new one, or simply to email me and I will sort it out.

Because removal depends on me acting on your email, please send the request to troy@troykelly.com rather than replying to the “from” address — that way it reaches the channel I actually monitor for this.

4. What is stored, and where

The newsletter keeps a small, plain record. For each subscriber I store:

• your email address (trimmed, lower-cased, and limited to 254 characters);
• your subscription status (pending, confirmed, or unsubscribed); and
• timestamps marking when the record was created, updated, sent, confirmed, and, if applicable, unsubscribed.

These records live in Cloudflare D1, a hosted database.

The confirmation link is backed by a single-use token, and I never store that token in readable form — only a SHA-256 hash of it is kept. That hash is cleared when you confirm; if you never confirm, the link is treated as expired after 7 days and stops working, though the record itself is not auto-deleted (there is no expiry job — see Retention below). Either way, even I cannot reconstruct your original confirmation link from what is stored.

The delivery of the confirmation email (and of the “already subscribed” note) is handled by Postmark, a transactional email provider, which receives your email address and the message so it can send it.

Cloudflare and Postmark are based in the United States, so some of this processing happens overseas. My Privacy Policy sets out the overseas-disclosure position in full.

Retention. A subscriber record persists until I remove it. There is no automatic deletion, so if you want your record gone, the way to make that happen is to email me (Section 3).

5. No tracking, and never sold

Two firm commitments about how I treat the list:

• No open or click tracking. The mail carries no tracking pixels and no link-wrapping. I do not measure whether you opened a message or which links you followed.
• Never sold, rented, or shared for marketing. Your address is used to send you the newsletter and nothing else. I do not sell it, rent it, hand it to advertisers, or use it to build a profile of you.

If either of these ever changes, I will update this page and describe the change plainly before it takes effect.

6. What the newsletter is, and how often it arrives

The newsletter is my occasional email about the things I write about on this site — personal essays, technical notes, and commentary. It is a modest, low-volume thing, not a marketing drip.

I want to be candid about the current state: the only emails the system sends today are the confirmation message and the “already subscribed” note described above. There is no recurring broadcast mechanism built yet, so you should not expect a steady stream of messages. When I do begin sending, my intention is that it stays occasional rather than frequent. If that changes materially, this page and my practice will change with it.

7. Changes to these terms

These terms are a notice, not a contract you sign. I may update them from time to time — for example, if I add a proper unsubscribe facility or begin sending regular issues. Any change takes effect when it is posted here, and the effective date at the top of this page always shows the current version. Where a change is material, I will say so.

8. Getting in touch

For anything to do with the newsletter — joining, leaving, correcting your address, or a question about how any of this works — email me at troy@troykelly.com.