3.2 KiB
Intro email for Hearth participants
Send this (as your own email, adjust the tone/details as you like) to
anyone before adding them to hearth.yml. The point is full transparency
to the human — they should know this is happening and why, even though
the individual messages themselves will just read as normal short emails.
Don't add anyone to hearth.yml until they've actually seen this and said
yes.
Real participant addresses live only in the gitignored hearth.yml on the
deploy host — never commit them.
Copy-paste template
Subject: Quick favor — helping my email server not look like spam
Hey [name],
Random favor to ask. I run my own email server (the "IT nerd homelab" thing), and small self-hosted mail servers like mine have a real problem: Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo don't trust them by default, so my emails sometimes land in spam even for real messages.
The fix is basically just... using it normally. The more genuine back-and-forth email traffic my addresses have — people actually opening, replying, and never marking it spam — the more the big providers trust the domain over time.
So here's the ask: every so often (probably a couple times a week at most, starting slower), you might get a short, casual email from one of my addresses. Nothing weird — just a "hey, checking in, how's it going" type message. If you could:
- Reply normally, like you would to a text — doesn't need to be long
- Mark it "Not Spam" if it ever lands in your Spam/Junk folder instead of your inbox
...that's genuinely the whole favor. No links, no attachments, no asking for anything else, ever. If it gets annoying or you just don't want to keep doing it, tell me and I'll take you off the list immediately, no hard feelings.
Let me know if you're in!
— [your name]
What to actually expect
- Frequency: starts at ~2-3 emails/day across everyone, not per person — so realistically a person hears from this maybe once or twice a week at first, ramping slowly from there.
- Tone: short (2-3 sentences), casual, plain text. Think "checking in" text message, not a newsletter.
- Timing: business hours only, your local time zone, spread out rather than bursts.
- Senders: real mailboxes I actually control — never a spoofed/unrelated identity.
- Never: links, attachments, requests for money/info/action, anything that reads like marketing.
Ideas for how to respond
You genuinely don't need to overthink this — normal-human-texting energy is exactly right:
- "Hey! Good, just got back from [whatever's actually true]. You?"
- Mention something current — weather, a show, work, kids, whatever's real for you that week.
- Ask something back ("How's the new place?" / "How was the trip?").
- Short is completely fine — a reply is a reply.
- You don't have to reply to every single one if you're busy; genuine replies matter more than volume.
Opting out
Anytime, no explanation needed — just say so and you're removed from
hearth.yml on the next deploy. Nothing keeps running in the background
once you're off the list; there is no separate "still emailing you" state.