Your data

Issue Mint holds three kinds of data: your account, your newsletter’s own contents, and what your readers did with the issues you sent them. This page says what is in each, what is deliberately not kept, and how long the rest lasts.

None of it is used for anything other than running your newsletter. Issue Mint has no advertising business and no data business, and what you pay is the whole revenue model.

What is stored about you

Your account holds your name, your email address, your timezone and a hash of your password, plus the state of your trial or subscription.

Two things beyond that are worth naming. Payment is handled by Stripe, so your account carries a customer reference and nothing else about the card. And Issue Mint records where the visit that became your registration came from: the landing page, the referring site and any campaign tags on the link. That is how we tell whether writing a documentation page was worth the afternoon, and it is not attached to anything your readers see.

What is stored about your readers

For each subscriber Issue Mint keeps the email address, a first name if one was given, how they joined, when they confirmed, and the network address the signup arrived from.

Then, per issue, a send log: one row per recipient with whether the message was delivered, when it was first opened, how many opens and clicks it accrued, and whether that reader unsubscribed. Clicks are stored one by one, so click tracking can tell you which link did the work, and each one carries the browser’s own description of itself and a keyed hash of the network address rather than the address.

What is never stored

Card numbers never reach Issue Mint. Subscribing and changing a card both happen on Stripe’s own pages, so there is nothing here to leak.

Four more, briefly. Raw network addresses are not kept against clicks, only that hash, which is enough to spot a scanner and useless for anything else. Robot opens are not stored at all, unlike robot clicks, which are kept and never counted. Sending credentials for your own Amazon or SMTP account are encrypted and never rendered, which the security page covers. And no page anywhere in Issue Mint counts visits to your archive website, so there are no visitor statistics to hold.

How long each thing is kept

While your account exists, your issues, your list and your figures are kept. Nothing expires them, nothing thins them out after a year, and there is no analytics retention window to work around.

Three clocks do run:

• Refused addresses, which an import declined because their domain cannot receive mail, are kept 180 days from the last time an import saw one, then deleted. That window exists so somebody can answer for them days later, and nobody needs a two-year-old typo to do it.
• A cancelled account is kept, whole and untouched, until 60 days after the plan ends, at which point Issue Mint emails you about it. Even then no schedule deletes anything: a person here has to act.
• Deleting your account removes everything immediately, and what deleting an account takes with it is the page to read before you do.

When you delete a reader

Deleting a subscriber removes their row, their name, their signup record and their place on your list, straight away and with no confirmation email to them.

The send log for issues already sent keeps the address it delivered to, and loses the link back to the person. That is what keeps an old issue’s delivery figures honest, and it means the address itself is still in the record of a send that really happened. If a reader has asked you to remove every trace and that record is part of what they mean, tell us which address and we will deal with it by hand.

What you can tell a reader who asks

A reader who writes to you can be told four things, all of them true and checkable.

Their address is used to send them the newsletter they asked for and nothing else. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link that works for good, so a message they kept for a year still gets them off the list, and unsubscribing is one click with no login and no reply. Whether they opened an issue and which links they clicked is recorded, and open tracking can be switched off per newsletter if you would rather not have it. And your archive website runs no JavaScript at all, so there is no advertising pixel and no third-party tracker on any page they read.