Email alerts

What actually arrives

One email a day at most, and only on a day when something new matched. Across the whole index 6,810 roles were published in the last seven days, spread over 429 employers — on the order of 973 a day with nothing filtered out at all. A search narrow enough to be worth reading takes a small fraction of that, which means it will be quiet for days at a time. Those days are silent rather than padded.

The alert is the search, unchanged: the same words, employer, function, level, department, country, workplace and age the filters on /jobs write into the URL. Nothing is added to it, nothing is broadened to fill an email, and there are no roles in it that you did not ask for.

Every role arrives with the employer’s date on it

Every alert anywhere fires on the same event — an index changed — and this one is no exception: a role reaches you when it first matches your search, which is when fable12 first read it. Any alert that claimed otherwise would be claiming to have seen a job before it saw it. What differs is what the email then tells you about the role.

Elsewhere, a requisition that has been open since March arrives in your inbox looking like it opened this morning, because the only date the sender has is the day their crawler found it — a fact about the crawler. Here it arrives saying it has been open since March. The date is the one the employer’s own hiring system reports, it travels with the role into the email, and a role does not become new because a recruiter edited a word in it. Where a system exposes both a created date and an updated one, the created one is what counts. How we know sets out where those timestamps come from, and which employers are missing because their boards publish none worth standing behind.

And if you only want roles the employer published recently, that is a filter rather than a promise: set the age on /jobs and it goes into the URL, so the alert applies it on every run. Ask for the last seven days and nothing older can reach you, however recently fable12 happened to read the board it was on.

Nothing is sent until you confirm

An address typed into a box is not consent from the person who owns it — anybody can type yours. So the first email is a confirmation, it is the only one that ever arrives unasked, and the alert does not start until the link in it is clicked. If you did not ask for it, doing nothing is the correct response and the whole of it.

There is a selfish reason too, and it is worth stating rather than dressing up. A list that never agreed to be a list bounces and gets marked as spam, and after enough of that a domain’s mail stops reaching anybody’s inbox at all. Confirming first is what keeps the alerts working for the people who did ask.

Stopping it

Every alert carries an unsubscribe link and clicking it is the entire process: no sign-in, no page asking why, no second screen confirming that you meant it. There is no account here to close, because there was never one to open.

Alerts come from [email protected], and replies to that address reach a person. It is a mailbox rather than a no-reply, so a wrong age, a role that should not be in the index, or a complaint about this email arriving at all can be sent straight back at it.

The address you give is stored so the alert can be sent to it. The privacy page sets out what this site holds, everyone a request touches on its way here, and how to have any of it removed.