changelog

Suppressed emails

September 4, 2025

The nature of managing user-generated content at scale is such that, while it might not necessarily be obvious, we spend the majority of our time behind the scenes working on edge cases. Like:

  • An email that's about to go out uses the phrase MetaMask three times, and we think it's probably a roundabout phishing attempt, but aren't exactly sure.
  • Or like we just got a form letter from Google saying that Crunchyroll is DMCA-ing a bunch of our content, even though 18 out of the 20 links they sent us are completely unrelated to anime.

Historically, our thought process has been to obfuscate this complexity and annoyance from authors like you as much as possible until the situation resolves itself.

But obfuscation quickly turns into confusion, especially recently as we've had to really scale up some of our content auditing. We've had a few folks suddenly discover that we have blocked one of their emails or de-indexed one of their archives with nary an error nor explanation. This is obviously not a great user experience, and to help ameliorate this, we're introducing a new status for your emails called Suppressed. If we ever have to suppress one of your emails, it'll be flagged in the dashboard with a helpful tooltip explaining how and or why. In addition, we'll send you an email notification and have it show up in Home.

Talking about this stuff can feel kind of weird — the equivalent of showing a diner the five-pound tub of Aramark ketchup right before their main course. I want to stress that this is an edge case; 99.9% of authors won't run into this and therefore have no reason to even read this changelog entry. But if you're in that 0.1%, we want to make sure we treat you well and give you all the information you need.

Buttondown is the last email platform you’ll switch to.