1. Information We Collect
We collect only what's necessary to deliver your newsletter and understand aggregate traffic:
- Email address — to send your daily digest.
- City preference — to customize your local content.
- Newsletter engagement — delivery, bounce, and complaint events to maintain list quality.
- Blocked subscribe attempts from a suppressed address — if an address we have stopped mailing (a previous bounce or complaint) tries to subscribe again, we record that address, the town it asked for, and when. It is how we notice that we stopped mailing somebody who still wants the newsletter, and it is the only thing we do with it: nothing is sent to these addresses, and nothing re-subscribes them. Kept for 90 days, then deleted.
- Sign-ups our bot check could not confirm — if Cloudflare’s check refuses a sign-up that otherwise looks like a person’s (the form was used in a browser, the town is real, the address is not a throwaway one), we keep the address, the town, the page it came from and the details listed above for subscribers, so a person here can review it and start the subscription. If we do not start it, nothing is sent. Kept for 90 days, then deleted. Every other kind of refused signup — spam traps, throwaway addresses, floods — is counted without keeping any address at all.
- A record of the emails we send you — for every email other than the daily edition itself (a welcome, a sign-in code, a receipt or payment link, a notice about a town you operate), we record your address, what kind of email it was, its subject, and whether it was delivered. It is how we answer "did that email reach me?" and notice when a kind of email stops arriving. Kept for 90 days, then deleted.
- Aggregate traffic metadata — when you visit our site, our server records the page path, the referring site, UTM parameters, approximate geography (country / state / city) derived from your IP, and device type. We do not store your raw IP address; a short one-way hash of IP + browser is used to count unique visitors and to limit how many brand-new towns one browser can open in a day, and is retained for 30 days. When a signup opens a town that has no edition yet, a separate one-way hash of your IP alone, under a key that changes every day, is kept for 24 hours so one connection cannot open more than a handful of new towns a day; it cannot be matched across days and is deleted after one. Each record also carries whether the request looked automated — a crawler, a script, or a vulnerability scanner — and which signal said so, which is a judgement about the request rather than anything further about you, and exists so that our published traffic figures describe people. On the page of a town that has no edition yet, the same hash is also recorded once a day with the town's name when you spend time on the page, so we can write that town's edition ahead of time; it is kept for the same 30 days.
For readers, that is the whole list — we do not collect names, phone numbers, payment information, or any other personal data. Sections 4 to 6 cover the separate, additional information we hold for people who buy a listing — an event or a business directory entry — or apply to operate a city.
2. How We Use Your Information
Your information is used solely to:
- Deliver your daily digest for your selected city.
- Improve content quality based on aggregate readership data.
- Send occasional service updates (e.g., new city launches).
- Suggest the town you might be near, on your first visit to our home page. For that one lookup we use the approximate city and coordinates Cloudflare derives from your IP, and we do not store them or log them. If you press “Use my location”, your browser asks your permission first, and the coordinates it shares (rounded to about a kilometre) are used the same way: once, to find the nearest town, and not kept. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control we make no suggestion at all. The town you choose is saved only in your own browser.
3. What We Don't Do
- We do not sell your email address or personal data to third parties.
- We do not share subscriber lists with advertisers, sponsors, or city operators — no export exists for them to use.
- We do not use your data for targeted advertising.
- We do not track your browsing activity outside of our emails.
4. City Operators and Sponsors
Some cities are run by a local "operator" who leases the commercial rights to that city's edition — they place their own business spotlight and receive a share of listing revenue for their city. Operators do not write the newsletter, do not review or approve listings, and this arrangement does not change what happens to your data.
An operator never sees your email address. There is no export, no subscriber list view, and no lookup of individual people — not in their dashboard, not through any API, and not on request. What an operator can see about their city is limited to aggregate figures:
- How many people subscribe, and how that count changes over time.
- How many editions were delivered, and how many failed.
- Broad, grouped signup sources (for example "search" or "social"), with small groups merged together so no individual can be singled out.
The spotlight is chosen by the operator, and paid listings — events and directory entries — are bought by their organizers, each for the whole city — nothing in an edition is targeted at you, and no personal data is used to select or personalise any of it. Every reader in a city receives the same edition. Because a city's operator can change over time, the business shown in your edition may change too. Neither operators nor listing buyers receive any personal data from us at any point.
5. If You Buy an Event Listing
Anyone can buy a listing for a local event on a city's page, without an account. If you do, we store what you typed into the form — the listing itself, any logo or photo you attach to a directory listing, and your email address, which is required because the receipt, the payment link, and any question about your listing go there. The form asks for no name. Your submission is also read by an automated compliance check before payment, as described in our Acceptable Use Policy §5.
- The event details are published once the listing is screened and paid — that's the point of buying one.
- Your email address is not. It is used by MailerDot for the purchase and support, is never shown to the city's operator, and is never included in the newsletter, on the public page, or in any API.
- Submitting a listing subscribes you to that city's daily email. The form says so beside your email address. It is the same edition every reader in that city receives, with the same one-click unsubscribe in every email; unsubscribing never affects your listing.
- Payment itself is collected by our merchant of record, named in Section 6 — we never see your card number.
- We do not use what you submit for marketing, and we do not sell or share it. Ask us and we will delete it (transaction records excepted, where the law requires keeping them).
6. Operator Waitlist and Payments
If you ask to lease a city, we store what you submit — your email address, the city you named, and optionally your business name and note — along with the referring site and any campaign parameters. We use it only to contact you about operating a city and to decide which cities to open first. It does not subscribe you to any newsletter. Ask us and we will delete it.
Payments — for a city lease and for a paid listing alike — are handled by Creem (Armitage Labs OÜ, registry code 16977866, Rotermanni 14, Tallinn 10111, Estonia) as our merchant of record — the legal seller on the transaction. Creem collects your card and billing details directly on its own checkout, is the independent controller of that data, and is responsible for the invoice and any sales tax or VAT. Its handling of your payment data is governed by Creem's privacy notice and the Creem Buyer Terms.
MailerDot never receives or stores your card number. What we keep about a lease is your email address, the cities you hold, the price, a customer and subscription reference from Creem, the current billing period, and a record of billing events — enough to know whether a lease is active and what it costs, and nothing more. To see your own receipts and orders on the payment side, use creem.io/my-orders/login.
7. Data Storage & Security
Your data is stored securely using industry-standard encryption. We use trusted third-party email delivery services that comply with data protection regulations. Access to subscriber data is limited to essential personnel only.
When you unsubscribe we delete the subscription itself, which is what stops the email. We keep a short record that it happened — your address, the city, the date, how long you had been subscribed, and whether you unsubscribed or your mailbox bounced — so that we can see which cities are losing readers and answer questions about a specific address if you write to us. It is read by us and nothing else: it never causes email, is never shared or sold, and does not re-subscribe you. Ask us and we will delete it along with everything else.
8. Cookies & Tracking
Our website uses only essential cookies required for basic functionality. We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or advertising and tracking scripts (no Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.); the third-party scripts are Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and collects no personal data, and Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that a sign-up or contact form is being sent by a person rather than a bot. Turnstile loads when you start filling in one of those forms (or with a town page's built-in sign-up form), looks at signals from your browser to tell people from bots, and does not use them for advertising or tracking you across sites. The aggregate traffic metadata described in Section 1 is collected server-side without cookies or browser fingerprinting.
There is one cookie, and it exists to reduce what we record. Our own staff can set an opt-out on a browser so that our visits to this site are excluded from our traffic figures — otherwise, on a site this size, checking the numbers is most of the numbers. It is set only from our signed-in admin console, contains a signed flag and an expiry date and nothing about any person, and is never set on a reader's browser.
9. Your Rights
You have the right to:
- Unsubscribe at any time via the link in every email.
- Request your data — ask us what information we hold about you.
- Request deletion — ask us to permanently remove all your data.
- Update your preferences — change your city or email address.
We honor the Global Privacy Control signal. If your browser or extension sends Sec-GPC: 1, we record no traffic metadata for your visit at all — no page path, no referrer, no approximate geography, not even the hashed visitor counter. Nothing about your visit reaches our database. The one exception is the 24-hour new-town hash described above, kept only if your signup opens a town that has no edition yet, because the limit it enforces would otherwise be switched off by the signal itself. We never sell or share personal data in any case, so there is nothing further to opt out of.
10. Third-Party Services
We do not embed third-party trackers or social media pixels. The complete list of processors that can touch personal data is short, and here it is:
- Cloudflare — hosting, the database that stores subscriptions, and delivery of every email we send. Processes data on our behalf under its data processing terms.
- Google (Gemini) — generates the text of each edition from public local sources. No subscriber address or reader data is ever sent to it; every reader in a city receives the same edition.
- Creem — payments for operator leases and paid listings, as merchant of record. Reading is free, so a reader who only reads never reaches it. See Section 6.
Nothing on this list receives a subscriber list, and none of it is used for advertising or profiling.
11. Third-Party Government Data
City demographic information displayed on MailerDot (such as population, median income, and housing data) is sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey via the Census Bureau Data API. This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
We do not combine Census Bureau data with subscriber information to identify any specific individual or household. Census data is used solely to provide general city-level context alongside newsletter content.
For more information about how the Census Bureau protects data, see the Census Bureau Data Protection and Privacy Policy.
12. The Brand Inspector Extension
We publish a free browser extension, Brand Inspector, which reads the page you are looking at and shows you its logos, colors, and fonts. It is a separate piece of software from this website, so it gets its own section — and the short version is that it is not a data product. It has no account, and there is no server of ours for it to talk to.
- Collected: nothing. No account, no sign-in, no telemetry, no analytics, and no server of ours the extension ever talks to.
- Stored: locally, never sent. Your settings, the markup notes you make on a page, and, for the last 20 sites you inspected, the scan results themselves — the colors and fonts found — sit in the browser’s own extension storage. That is what lets the panel say a color is on every page of a site, and what changed since your last visit. Clearable from the panel in one click, removed when you uninstall, never synced to another device.
- Transmitted: nothing. A scan reads the page already open in front of you. Downloading an asset fetches it from the site serving it — the same request your browser already made to show you the page — and no third party is involved at any point. The only time anything leaves is when you click a link yourself.
Two consequences worth stating plainly, because they are the questions people actually ask. The extension requests permission to read any site you visit; that is what lets the panel keep up as you move between tabs without you clicking on every page, and the reading happens entirely inside your browser. And it never routes an image through a third-party proxy to fetch it — an earlier generation of tools like this did, which quietly told someone else which sites you were looking at.
Uninstalling removes everything it stored. Nothing survives on our side, because nothing reached our side. The same three statements appear in the extension’s store listing and in its own help panel.
13. Children's Privacy
MailerDot is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has subscribed, please contact us and we will remove their data promptly.
14. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy as our practices evolve. Material changes will be noted at the top of this page. Continued use of the Service constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.
15. Contact
Privacy questions, data access, and deletion requests: legal@mailerdot.com. Billing and account questions: use our support contact form.