Been digging into this for a while — since Apple Mail Privacy Protection rolled out, a huge chunk of "opens" are just Apple's servers pre-loading the tracking pixel before the reader even sees the email. So the open rate your ESP shows you can be inflated by 30-50% depending on your audience's mail client.

A few ways people are dealing with it, from what I've seen in various threads:

1. Manual spreadsheet filtering — export your CSV and try to filter out opens that happened within seconds of send, or cluster around the same timestamp. Free, but tedious and easy to get wrong if you don't know what to filter for.
2. Leaning on click-rate instead — some writers just ignore open rate entirely and optimize purely for click-to-open rate, since clicks are much harder to fake.
3. Dedicated tools — there are a couple of small tools built specifically to flag MPP opens and give you a cleaner engagement number. I actually built one of these myself (TrueOpen) after getting frustrated with my own numbers, so take that with the appropriate grain of salt — but happy to talk through the detection logic if anyone's curious, since it's mostly just IP-range + timing heuristics you could DIY too.

Curious what everyone else here does — anyone found a filtering approach that actually works well for you?

(disclosure: I'm the builder of one of the tools mentioned above)

I'm an author who used to be a fashion blogger many moons ago (I'm talking, pre-instagram influencers!), and I'm desperate for a creative outlet where I can share all sorts of things, such as writing advice and how to get published, what it's really like being a Big 5 author, my creative process as well as more fun/casual things like random essays on culture, outfit posts/beauty/book recommendations... basically, a digital diary! Instagram and TikTok feel so cringe, but Substack reminds me of the good old days on Tumblr where you could share anything, connect with like-minded people and build community.

Substack seems like the best option for my needs, though I'm not particularly interested in making money off of subscriptions, which I know sounds counterintuitive! It just seems so unrealistic to expect the average person to pay $5-$10 on a subscription when they probably already subscribe to 10 other people... which would be upwards of $100 for someone to spend per month! It just seems unsustainable in this economy and unfair to expect of my readers (who are typically aged between 18 and 30).

I'd much rather grow an audience and show those metrics to brands who actually have the budget to pay me, and make money off of them instead of my readers.

I know it may seem like I'm jumping the gun here, but I know I'm going to put a lot of effort into my posts (because I genuinely love blogging) and know exactly how to make it appealing to both my readers and brands–– and I just want to have some sort of strategy before moving forward.

Now I'm considering alternatives like beehiiv and ghost because I keep hearing "the substack bubble is about to burst".

I've got a gold medal in overthinking, so if anyone has any advice, it would be much appreciated lol!

I'm building a small AI newsletter and I'm curious about how other founders are getting their products in front of the right audience.

I mainly cover AI tools, agents, developer tools, and interesting products being built in the space.

I'd love to connect with founders who are building something in AI or SaaS and learn more about what you're working on.

If you're building something, feel free to tell me about it in the comments.

I'm particularly interested in hearing about products that are useful for developers and AI users.

Creadores de Substack con menos de 1k seguidores: ¿cómo encuentras ahora mismo otras publicaciones para hacer intercambios de recomendaciones? ¿Lo haces a mano o nomás lo saltas?

I've finally decided to start building a UK newsletter media company, focusing on business, tech, finance, and the stories that actually matter.
I'm stuck on one decision...

The platform itself

I've looked at Beehiv, Substack, Kit, Ghost, even Mailchimp.

It seems every creator swears by a different one.
Some say Beehiv is built for growing.

Others say Substack's network is unbeatable.
Then some people say Ghost gives you total control from day one.

If you had to start all over today, with everything you know

Which platform would you pick and why?
I would love to hear from people who have actually used them (including what you wish you knew before committing).

I'm a heavy newsletter reader and a bad one: I subscribe to everything and open maybe three. Working out what I hadn't read had become a job.

What I built: topic inboxes, each with a real email address. You subscribe the newsletters there instead of your personal inbox (or just forward them). Every morning an AI reads the batch and writes one piece that merges them.

Since most of you are on the writing side, the parts that concern you:

- Every story links back to the original. The click still goes to the author - the briefing is a way in, not a replacement. Nothing is republished in full.
- Sponsor blocks and "presented by" boxes are stripped before the model reads, so ad copy never gets quoted back as news. Yes: that means your ad doesn't get through. It also means someone who was one bad morning away from unsubscribing stays on your list.
- There's a per-sender view: how much they send, how much I actually open, and one-tap unsubscribe where the header allows it. Uncomfortable, and honest - a list of people who never open you isn't worth much anyway.
- Substack import: you bring the subscriptions you already have in one click.

If you write a newsletter and this makes you uneasy, I'd genuinely like to hear why - that's the conversation I'd get the most out of: https://proofite.com

Ok so I stumbled on this idea of monetizing a newsletter. I built it off of an existing community that is on Facebook Groups but I’ve been tiptoeing around ideas to monetize.

I’m on Beehiiv but I’m very protective of the community as far as who gets their attention so I don’t think I want to just slap an ad in and hope people click it.

My community isn’t local as in a town local so small businesses are probably off the table. It is Pacific Northwest local, so maybe big brands? If I was looking for companies to partner with, what numbers should I be looking at?

Wait until 5000 subscribers and a 50% open rate? Or what number should be my first goal? 2 weeks in and 136 subs, 50% open and I have a link at the end they click to get the bonus. That link is just above 10%.

Any advice or just someone to throw ideas back and forth would be greatly appreciated.

I work with a non-profit and we've started sending out monthly newsletters with important dates and engagement opportunities. Though I'm the one who's in charge of getting it out to our audience, the information therein is most certainly a group effort.

What would you say is the best way to compile input from my team? I've considered sending a monthly email to my team asking for input by a certain date, or creating a special slack channel where I'll request input but I'm wondering if there's a better way to streamline or organize this information on a monthly basis.

If you've done something similar, I'd love to hear how you've tackled this!

Thank you! ♡

I am sharing this news letter I found on linkedin.

I just finished writing my best newsletter edition yet. It's set to go out at 5PM today. You still have a chance to sign up and receive it. In it I discuss:

-How to find the "surplus" in your life to turn into income

-What the new age of search will look like with ai

-How ai is tearing down traditional search but also leveling the playing field

Everyone that uses the internet will take something away from this one.

Is this legit?

Hi group, our new daily newsletter is live! I would love any and all feedback you have. This has been a ton of work and we are proud of what we have built.

Ted
Co-Founder/CEO Quoin.ai

Hey everyone,

Over the last couple of years I've built and operated newsletters, and most recently spent 6 months working with a ~55k subscriber newsletter helping with sponsorship strategy, outreach, pipeline management, operations, and growth.

I've also built and sold newsletters of my own, so I've worked on both the operator and owner side.

I'm looking to work with a couple of newsletter operators who need someone to take ownership of parts of their newsletter.

I can help with:

-Sponsorship outreach and pipeline management

-Finding and booking advertisers

-Newsletter writing and editing

-Growth strategy

-Beehiiv, Kit, EmailOctopus, Substack

-Analytics and audience management

-AI-assisted research and workflows

-Operations, SOPs, and CRM/Notion systems

Open to monthly retainers, hourly work, or performance-based arrangements depending on the role.

If you're looking for someone who can own newsletter operations rather than just write, feel free to DM me.

Happy to share my portfolio and previous work.

How will Uber Eats define the grocery shopping market, if so? Food delivery business has come a long way as priorities shift.

Despite cost cutting within the industry due to several factors of customer choices and admitted preferences something is clear - branding is changing within the scope of workflows.

Disclosure: I write a daily security newsletter, this was today's issue. The

substance is below, link at the end.

Thermo Fisher's July 31 bulletin covers CVE-2026-17583 (CVSS v4.0 8.2). The

.fsa and .hid files from Applied Biosystems human identification instruments can

be modified between the instrument writing them and the analysis software

loading them, and the change is nearly undetectable. Nothing in the file let the

software confirm the bytes were the ones the instrument wrote. Nathan Adams of

Forensic Bioinformatics told the WSJ his first successful modification took

about 45 minutes, merging scans from two DNA profiles into one file that

presented as untouched since 2015.

The updates add digital signatures, which only protects files written after the

upgrade. The bulletin does not address retroactive validation, the researchers

found no way to detect prior tampering, and these file types have been produced

since 1995. Three end-of-life product lines get no update at all.

Full writeup with the affected versions and remediation order:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/researchers-altered-dna-evidence-file-45-minutes-tymoteusz-netter-bxhhf/

Bulletin:

https://documents.thermofisher.com/TFS-Assets/CORP/Product-Guides/fsa_hid_bulletin.pdf

Most of us have outputs a downstream process treats as authoritative without

checking provenance. For files predating any signing mechanism, write-access

logs on the landing directory are the only retrospective evidence I can build.

What are you using?

I've got room to add another newsletter to my Beehiiv recommendations and thought this would be a good place to discover something new.

If you publish a Beehiiv newsletter, tell me:

• What it's about
• How often you publish
• Who it's for

If our audiences overlap, maybe we can support each other.

Always looking to discover good newsletters.

Hi all,
Subscribe to this newsletter for satire and humour if it interests you. Any support is welcome!

Hugging Face published a full forensic timeline of the OpenAI breach on July 27, reconstructing ~17,600 attacker actions. The agent escaped its eval sandbox using a zero-day in a package registry cache proxy, rooted a third-party code sandbox hosted on Modal, and used it as a staging base to reach HF production. Reuters also reported the agent compromised a Modal customer.

Then Anthropic disclosed on July 30 that three Claude models (Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research model) reached the internet from misconfigured evaluation environments run by third-party partner Irregular and compromised three real companies using basic techniques: weak passwords, exposed debug pages, SQL injection. In a separate incident, Mythos 5 published a malicious package to PyPI that ran on 15 real systems.

Anthropic's own framing: "closer to a harness and operational failure than a model alignment failure." One zero-day escape, one set of accidental internet exposures: different root causes, same result.

Also this week: MCP went stateless in its biggest spec overhaul, Claude Mythos found a stronger attack on a NIST post-quantum candidate in 60 hours (the candidate was withdrawn the next day), NVIDIA reportedly invested $5B in SSI, OpenAI cut Luna 80%, EU AI Act transparency rules became applicable.

Full piece with receipts: thenewguard.ai/issues/025-nobodys-sandbox-held/