A Mailbox and a Front Door

Signals already have their own inbox — Notifications, the paper trail for every entry and exit. This is a different room. Messages is where we write to you — announcements from the team and letters addressed to your account — kept deliberately apart from the signal log so neither drowns the other.

Unread mail sits open; once you've read it, it folds down to a title and a one-line preview — a tidy stack you can scan. A personal letter wears a DIRECT chip, so you know it's meant for you and not the whole room. Everything's grouped by date with a LAST VISIT line marking where you left off, and any letter you'd rather not see again, you can quietly hide.

Talking back used to mean copying an email address off the page and hoping it reached us. That address is gone now — no personal inbox posted anywhere on the site — and in its place, an actual door. The Contact page carries a short form: pick one of four subject chips, write your message, send. Sign-in required, up to five a day — enough to say what you need, not so many the mailbox floods.

Some news shouldn't wait for you to open a page. When there's something everyone needs to know — a planned pause, a change to how something works — a slim gold strip can appear above the top bar, visible even to a logged-out visitor. Read it, dismiss it, and it stays gone for the rest of your visit — and if we forget to take it down, it expires on its own.

A mailbox, a door, a strip on the frame — the house is easier to talk to now, and the talk runs both ways. But notice what arrives here never does: it tells you what's happening, never what to do next, and it never asks you to trade.