Hey man, I believe most of us here know how hard it is to bootstrap something and lift it off the ground. From my side, I admire your product, and I admire the hell out of the fact that you've open sourced it. Which is why I would have totally been fine with just the first email, but the second one pushed it from "start-up founder struggling to get momentum" to "spammer that won't leave me alone". You were just too aggressive about it, but I do think the way you're handling it now is great.
There's one thing I'm honestly curious of, because I've seen this technique before, and it's not necessarily a question to you, but to anyone who might read this: do these pretend-personal emails actually work on anyone? Your product is targeted at users with a pretty high technical skillset, do you think they really believe you hand-wrote that email? Because I could smell the automation right away, even before I checked the message source and saw the HTML structure and the tracking image. It's fake, it feels fake, and to me it's actually worse than an openly-automated message, because it insults me by assuming I can't tell it's not sent by a human. I think perhaps tactics like these work better on less-technical people (though they still shouldn't be employed at all!)
There's one thing I'm honestly curious of, because I've seen this technique before, and it's not necessarily a question to you, but to anyone who might read this: do these pretend-personal emails actually work on anyone? Your product is targeted at users with a pretty high technical skillset, do you think they really believe you hand-wrote that email? Because I could smell the automation right away, even before I checked the message source and saw the HTML structure and the tracking image. It's fake, it feels fake, and to me it's actually worse than an openly-automated message, because it insults me by assuming I can't tell it's not sent by a human. I think perhaps tactics like these work better on less-technical people (though they still shouldn't be employed at all!)