📧 The girl who sends the newsletters

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👋 Hey!

Last winter, Alyssa Curnutt was entering a raffle at the Davenport in Spokane when the woman taking down her email address stopped and looked up. Curnutt braced for the usual question about being that real estate agent from Instagram.

Instead, the woman asked if she was the girl who sends out the weekly newsletters. She read it every Thursday and used it to plan weekends with her granddaughter.

Curnutt has 35,000 Instagram followers. The stranger knew her from the inbox.

This week: Gmail's AI Inbox starts sorting work email for paid Workspace users, Every's CEO declares the newsletter dead, and the Supreme Court weighs a newsletter subscriber's pixel lawsuit. Plus a quiz that took one newsletter from 17 signups a day to 125, a sender-name test where the brand beat the person, and a tool that shows you which of your sentences sound like a robot wrote them.

Let's dive in! 👇

Gmail's AI Inbox is rolling out to paid Google Workspace users in the US. It pulls to-dos from threads, summarizes the topics it decides matter most, and admins can't turn it off. For B2B newsletters, the question is whether Gemini thinks you're a priority.

Every CEO Dan Shipper says the newsletter is dead. His company runs on a newsletter and it has 120k+ subscribers, but Shipper says agents now read his inbox for him. His fix: get installed in your readers' AI agents.

beehiiv's new WordPress plugin publishes your posts straight to your newsletter. The same update sends signups back to Meta through Meta's Conversions API and syncs HubSpot contacts. WordPress is on Pro and Enterprise plans; Meta and HubSpot are in beta.

Substack's app drove nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions in six months. More than half came straight from the Notes feed. New dials let readers turn video, audio, longform and community posts up or down, mute keywords and auto-label AI-generated content.

AI Undetectable: catch the robotic sentences before your subscribers do

Why You'll Love It: Paste a draft, get an AI-likelihood score, rewrite the stiff passages, then read the original and the rewrite side by side before you send. The rewriter rebuilds sentence rhythm and paragraph flow while keeping your facts, names, numbers and claims in place. Our favorite detail is the honesty: in its own testing, 0% of rewrites consistently passed both public detectors, so it treats the score as a map of where to edit.

Best For: Operators who draft with AI and want the robotic phrasing gone before it hits the inbox, plus anyone running a non-English edition. There's a 3-day trial, and the paid plan you pick starts automatically unless you cancel.

Swap your lead magnets for a quiz that gates the results

How: Build a short quiz that sorts readers into one of your audience types, and ask for an email address before you show the result. Tag each new subscriber with their result and answers in your ESP, then point your main social channel at the quiz instead of your signup page. That's the playbook Esteban Perez and Ammaar Khan ran at The ADHD Weasel, a newsletter for late-diagnosed ADHD adults: six ADHD types, results behind an email form, quiz data pushed into beehiiv, and most of their Threads traffic sent to the quiz. They built it themselves with Claude Code and Vercel, but a quiz tool like Interact practically does the same job.

Why: They had more than 250,000 Threads followers and four lead magnets, and still only got about 17 signups a day. Growth In Reverse creator Chenell Basilio, who wrote up the case, says a quiz stands out because everyone else is giving away PDFs and checklists. And someone who just answered the questions wants their result badly enough to type in an email. The tags pay off later, too: you know which back issues will land with which reader.

Expected Result: Daily signups went from about 17 to about 125, roughly 7x. They added 1,439 subscribers in the first week, which used to take a quarter, and the quiz now drives about 88% of all new subscribers. Meta ads pointed at the quiz brought their cost per lead down to $0.51, against a $3 to $8 benchmark. These are self-reported numbers from a niche where "which type are you?" is hard to resist, so build your segments around a question your readers genuinely want answered.

Read the case study.

What works:

Creator quote: "I have not changed a template in mine since I started two years ago." Alyssa Curnutt, real estate agent, Spokane

Your takeaway: If you sell something, split the relationship newsletter from the pitch. Give everyone the issue they actually signed up for, invite only the interested readers onto the sales list, and end every sales email with a poll about whatever they just read. The 65% open rate is what happens when the only people on a list are the ones who asked to be there.

Read the full breakdown.

Test: Luther Seminary, which trains Christian leaders for ministry, ran three sender-name tests on donor cultivation emails between August and September, each sent to roughly 37,000 to 40,000 people on its list. Test 1 pitted "Jill Kane, Luther Seminary" against "Jill Kane." Test 2 tried "Jill, Luther Seminary" against the original. Test 3 dropped the person entirely: "Jill, Luther Seminary" against plain "Luther Seminary."

Result: Removing the organization name in test 1 dipped opens from 17.1% to 16.5%, and dropping the last name in test 2 nudged them from 14.2% to 14.8%. Neither result reached 95% confidence. Test 3 did: the organization-only sender opened at 21.2% against 18.7%, a 13.1% relative lift across 36,579 recipients. Clicks among openers rose from 11.8% to 13.0%, but that difference wasn't significant.

Takeaway: The personal touch lost to the brand. NextAfter, which documented the tests, thinks readers recognized and trusted "Luther Seminary" faster than they recognized Jill. If people subscribed to your publication rather than to you, test your newsletter's name in the From field. And steal the method: two inconclusive tests came first, and each one shaped the next. Just remember these are open rates on a nonprofit donor list, so judge your own version on clicks as well.

Read the write-up.

Thanks for reading,

Eren & Cagri