The Austin Read / anti-spam policy

Anti-spam policy

This website is not advertised using unsolicited bulk or automated email, by us or by anyone acting on our behalf. That prohibition is the policy, and it binds us, any vendor we hire, and any third party. We do not run an affiliate program, and nobody is authorized to promote theaustinread.com in exchange for compensation of any kind.

What we never do

• Send bulk, broadcast, or machine-generated mail from this domain.
• Use email warmup services, mail-volume services, or any tool that generates synthetic message traffic. We used one such service until 31 July 2026. It was the cause of the abuse pattern reported against this domain, and we have discontinued it.
• Buy, rent, or trade mailing lists, or use list brokers, data vendors, or third-party contact databases.
• Hire or permit affiliates, resellers, or third-party senders to mail on our behalf.
• Add anyone to a mailing list without telling them first, in the message itself, before they reply.

Where addresses come from

Addresses are collected programmatically, and we would rather describe that exactly than summarize it flatteringly. We pay a third-party scraping service to read Google Maps business listings for Austin. For each listing, its contact add-on fetches the website published on that listing and extracts an email address posted there. Where that website is a third-party booking or hosting page rather than the business's own domain, the address comes from that page. We also run a narrower collector restricted to the business's own domain, which refuses Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, and Instagram. We do not guess or construct addresses, and we do not buy, rent, or trade lists.

What we do send

One-to-one business correspondence, from a named person to a named business, about editorial coverage in The Austin Newsletter: an invitation to be featured, a note that a business has been included in a published guide, or a reply to someone who wrote to us first. Each message is addressed to one named business, about that specific business, and names the page it appears on. The wording follows a short standard template with those details filled in for each recipient. It is not retyped by hand, and we say so rather than claim otherwise. Sending is capped and spaced, one message per recipient. There is no bulk send, no list upload, and no mailing-list software involved.

Subscribing, and how we tell you

Our invitation states in the message itself that replying will add you to the weekly newsletter, and how to decline. If you reply without declining, we subscribe you and say so in our response, and every edition carries a one-click unsubscribe. We never subscribe anyone who has not been given that notice first, and never anyone who declines.

Contact limits and opt-out

• One invitation per business, ever, enforced in code at both drafting and sending, by address and by business. A business that has been contacted is permanently excluded from further invitations.
• At most one follow-up if there is no reply. After that, we stop.
• Any request to stop, in any wording, is honored immediately and permanently, with no reply required and nothing to click.
• Every message identifies the sender, the publication, and a postal address, and is sent from a monitored mailbox that a human reads.

Reporting a violation

If you received mail referencing this domain that does not match the description above, we want to know, and we will treat it as a compromise or a forgery of our domain. Write to carissa@theaustinread.com with the full message headers. Reports are investigated the day they arrive.

The Austin Read is the outreach desk of The Austin Newsletter, an independent weekly guide to eating and drinking in Austin, Texas. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are published for this domain.

EFFECTIVE 1 AUGUST 2026  ·  THE AUSTIN NEWSLETTER  ·  1620 EAST RIVERSIDE DR, AUSTIN, TX 78741