If we got a penny for every time we’d hear the phrase “email is dead”, “newsletters are dying” or “it’s the end of email”…

Yeah, we’d be making bank 😅 (and that’s just this year alone).

But somehow, this round feels a little different, because some of the people saying it run newsletters themselves (and a few of their reasons are worth kinda hearing out).

About two or so weeks ago, Dan Shipper, the CEO of Every, posted on X that "the newsletter is dead".

And he wasn't shouting from the sidelines either. In his words, "@every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers, so I don't say this lightly."

A couple of weeks later, The Ankler ran a piece on "peak newsletter" that opened with tech journalist Taylor Lorenz saying, "Newsletters are cooked." Her view, as Lex Roman reports it, is that AI will make them obsolete in five years.

Add a steady drip of "AI agents don't read newsletters" posts, and you've got yourself a proper funeral…

Yep, it’s the end as we know it (or is it?)

Some of this is true.

Inboxes are getting filtered, and not only by us hitting that bulk delete button. Google says Gmail's AI Inbox started rolling out to paid Workspace users from 12 October, with "Suggested to-dos" and "Topics to catch up on" sitting on top of your actual emails. It's US-only and in English for now, but you can see where this is heading (hello Skynet).

Hey, we took a look at what AI summaries do to your email back in Vol. 70, and the short version still stands: the summary gets read first, and your email has to pretty much earn the click after that.

But Shipper's sharpest line is kinda one we'd stick on the fridge: "getting a person's email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to."

Ouch. Hurts to hear, but fair enough.

Lex Roman, who writes Revenue Rulebreaker, put her finger on exactly what bugged us in her newsletter this week:

That's the panic summed up so damn poetically.

And it's also why so many senders are wondering if they should be writing for AI agents, pumping out AI-written issues to keep up, or rebuilding everything around whichever inbox feature launched this week (and there’s ALWAYS something launching…that’s 2026 for you now, ain’t it?).

Lex's answer is refreshing, though. Newsletters, in her words, are "a communication tool. You can't cook communication."

And we'd add one thing here too: an email address never guaranteed a relationship in the first place anyway.

It's permission, nothing more. The relationship is whatever you send to it, and whether anyone would miss it if it stopped. (Yes, sharp-eyes-Sara, we droned on about just that in Vol. 77 too 😅)

Look, even Shipper concedes that "It doesn't mean people won't read newsletters." A filter's job is to hide the emails nobody chose anyway. The ones people go looking for? Yeah, they’ll still get through.

And when someone says newsletters are "cooked", it's worth asking what's actually cooked. So often, it's a business model (paid subscriptions, ad rates, the maths of growth, etc., etc). Whether people still read is a separate question.

So, the (beautiful?) irony in all of this? Panic-publishing more AI filler is exactly what makes those filters so damn necessary.

Yet, while half the internet was writing eulogies, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway announced a newsletter (we always celebrate new newsletters).

According to Axios, Pivot Post launched on the 2nd of November. The list started with emails gathered while marketing their live tour, and the hosts will answer selected questions from readers.

So, here’s a prime example of where the relationship came first, and the newsletter is, well, simply where it lives.

And that doesn't look like a format on its deathbed, now, does it?

So instead of "participate or die", here's a bit of a sanity-check for whatever the keep-up crowd throws at you next. (And yes, we run it on ourselves first. You know the drill.)

1. Test what touches your reader.

Gmail's summaries are real, so run the damn summary test. Write your last email's point in a single line, and if a reader only got that line, would they lose anything?

If the answer's no, a filter will happily hand them that line and skip the rest. If you give them something only the full email has (a story, a tool, a question, a bit of you), well, that’s a little tougher to summarise now, isn’t it?

2. Ignore what only feeds the fear.

Rewriting for AI agents instead of people? Doubling your send volume because "everyone's using AI now"? If it doesn't make a real reader more likely to open, click or reply, it can wait.

Being a little late to a trend costs you very little. Burning your readers' trust costs a lot. And, for the love of all things science, remember that media thrives off of fear…yep, even in email.

It’s much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality, after all (see what we did there?)

3. Double down on the proof.

Open rates flatter everyone (it’s okay, we all need an empty ego boost at times), so, as we always advise, look at clicks, replies and spam reports instead.

Take our receipts, straight from beehiiv, as an example of this: over the last six months, our click rate has averaged 13.5% (beehiiv's total click rate, measured against opens), with just one spam report across more than 27,000 delivered emails (it still bugs us, man).

But this tells us people are choosing to do something with what we send.

Next, count who comes looking for you: those unprompted replies, those forwards, those questions, and let’s not forget those shares from one inbox to another. Borrow a page from Pivot Post and turn those questions into topics (we covered getting honest answers out of readers in Vol. 76).

If your newsletter stopped tomorrow, who would email to ask where it went?

If you can name a handful of people, you're in a better space than the headlines suggest. But if you can't, that's your next few sends sorted (no AI agent required).

Either way, tell us why you open ours (we promise to read every one, and no AI summary required).

Forget participate or die, friends. Be the email they'd go looking for!

What have we found to expand your email knowledge today?

Here are a few of our favourite links from across the email and business world, carefully curated just for you:

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It’s that time of the year…

Yep, whoever Neil Renic is, he knows. Let’s just say you’ve got 57 days of opening emails at the emails job left in 2026.

Hang in there!