A week in. Updates and Thoughts

I am at day 9 of the migration from Substack, and I have learned a few things I would like to share.

A lot of people have terrible email hygiene

Each newsletter goes out to about 2,055 people. The bulk mailer, Mailgun does an admirable job of trying to get the emails into every inbox.

The first couple of batch sends identified 17 addresses that were no longer in existence. Honestly, I was surprised it was so low. They were easy to cull from the membership list.

But, the next shock was how many people have emails bounced because their inbox is full. Mostly, these are Hotmail, Gmail, and accounts you get for free with your broadband service. (There are a surprising number of people with comcast.net addresses. I have never once used the email assigned by Comcast/xfinity) About 170 people have full inboxes.

Too many people use gmail

Seriously, Google spies on you, leveraging all your activity to build a dossier that they can use to target ads, and to sell information about you to others.

The old adage "if you aren't paying for a service, it turns out that you are the product". Google doesn't run their mail service as a charity, although a LOT of people do seem to believe that they are providing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

That is poppycock. They are hoovering up all the data they can find on you, linking that email ID to all the tracking that they do of you all across the web. That is where they make their money.

You all should look to a paid service. I use both Proton Mail and Fastmail. They provide a degree of privacy (proton more so), and Fastmail integrates seamlessly with 1Password to make unique email addresses so that when (not if, it is when) a data breach happens, the hackers will get an email address that is not used anywhere, so they can't use credential stuffing to gain access.

50,000 emails is not that many

The tier of Mailgun service I use provides 50K emails a month. Overages are pretty inexpensive, but still an additional charge. I am 9 days in, and I have sent 22K emails already.

Clearly, I am going to accrue a hefty overage. No big deal, but it is what it is.

Some of you seem intent on helping defray the cost

I am touched. I really can afford this without impairment to my beer fund (note: I don't drink beer, it leads to flare-ups of gout).

Ok, I will add a "Buy me a Coffee" button. All money that comes in will be donated to a robotics club for high school students that one of my colleagues donates his time to. It will help the kids.

The documentation sucks

I spent WAY too much time to figure out how to send the musical posts under a separate newsletter. I know that many of my readers read one type of post, or the other, but don't like both.

Now, if you want to opt out of the Music posts, you can, and you will not see them in your inbox.

When you click on the "Account" button, you will see this pop-up:

If you click on the "Manage" link next to Emails, you can enable or disable any of the sub-newsletters, to tune your inbox.

My tastes in music are not for everyone, and I promise I will not be offended if you unsubscribe. Pinky swear.

Anyhow, more learning will continue, but so far, I am satisfied. Running a self hosted service is not for everyone, but it can be rewarding.

In the near future, I will document my experience in moving from Substack to here.