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There's lots of reasons for the renaissance in "newsletters" (what we used to call moderated mailing lists), but top of the list was the realization by all kinds of companies, organizations and individuals that trusting Google or Facebook was a very bad bet.
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Google delivered the first warning shot when it started shuttering its social networking tools based on inscrutable business logic.
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But FB showed us the worst endgame when it deployed algorithms that located vibrant "fan pages" and dialed down their ability to reach subscribers who'd asked to see updates; then approached those neutered page owners with offers to "boost their reach" for pay.
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Allowing a Big Tech company to hold your customers hostage was obviously a losing bet. But thankfully, there's one major, federated platform left online, the original one: email.
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By switching to email to communicate with stakeholders, businesses, orgs and individuals could insulate themselves from the arbitrary decisions of Big Tech execs whose indifference or greed had destroyed so many successful, hard-built lists.
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And what's more, a raft of companies - Mailchimp and its competitors - sprang up to help these companies run their lists. But these companies leave a lot to be desired, starting with their widespread deployment of "read receipts" and other privacy-invading tricks.
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And then there's their role in enabling a bunch of toxic behavior (I've unsubscribed from hundreds of Mailchimp lists, but I never signed up for any of them, and the company won't tell me which other lists I'm on and let me unsubscribe from them, too).
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But running a moderated mailing-list isn't rocket science. If you operate your own mail-server, you can set up a free/open list-management tool like Mailman in minutes.
Email is federated, right? So you don't need to pay Big Tech or a spying, spammy mailing list company.
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Email is federated, right? So you don't need to pay Big Tech or a spying, spammy mailing list company.
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Well...
Email is much more federated in practice than it is in reality.
Most of us get our email from one of a few giant email providers - Google, Apple, or our ISPs, like AT&T and its myriad subsidiaries.
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Email is much more federated in practice than it is in reality.
Most of us get our email from one of a few giant email providers - Google, Apple, or our ISPs, like AT&T and its myriad subsidiaries.
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This concentration of email into a few hands is risky, but it's made even riskier by years of overzealous spamfighting. The creation of secret blocklists of "bad mail servers"...
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...as well as secret rules for selecting blocking or passing email means that sending mail from your own mailserver is harder than it's ever been.
I've been running my own mailserver since the 20th century (more accurately, @orenwolf has run one for me!).
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I've been running my own mailserver since the 20th century (more accurately, @orenwolf has run one for me!).
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I routinely find that I can't exchange email with people because their mail provider has blacklisted my mailserver for looking spammy, despite the fact that the server has one user, me. I admit that I live in email, but I don't send THAT much.
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For example, AT&T - and its subsidiaries - blocked email from my server for FIVE YEARS, despite calls, emails, and public shaming on Twitter and elsewhere.
Needless to say, spam is still alive and well (and inspiring even more onerous, secretive mail procedures).
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Needless to say, spam is still alive and well (and inspiring even more onerous, secretive mail procedures).
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Now, I have a newsletter, the plura-list. It's a small, cozy thing that I started in January as a way of getting the threads I post to Twitter (and mirror to my blog, http://Pluralistic.net ) in a single daily email.
https://mail.flarn.com/mailman/listinfo/plura-list/
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https://mail.flarn.com/mailman/listinfo/plura-list/
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This weekend, I lost every single subscriber who had used a http://Mac.com , http://Me.com , or other Apple-controlled mail provider.
Why? Because Apple had been rejecting email from my server after an algorithm flagged it as spam.
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Why? Because Apple had been rejecting email from my server after an algorithm flagged it as spam.
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(It's not spam. The list uses a double opt-in where you have to sign up and then click a link that's sent to your email).
Now, if you get bounces from a mailserver and don't unsubscribe the bouncing account, there's a good chance the mailer will block you as a spammer.
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Now, if you get bounces from a mailserver and don't unsubscribe the bouncing account, there's a good chance the mailer will block you as a spammer.
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So after my mailing list manager saw a bunch of bounces from Apple's mailservers, it kicked every Apple user out automatically.
Which raises the question, why did Apple start bouncing my emails?
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Which raises the question, why did Apple start bouncing my emails?
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That's not clear, but the best guess is that some subscribers didn't open their emails for several consecutive days, which caused Apple to assume that the list was spam, and start to bounce ALL messages sent to ALL Apple users.
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There are ways around this. I could sign up with Mailchimp or one of its rivals - companies that have done deals with the big mail services to treat their email as non-spam. Or I can dial the number of bounces before unsubscribe way up (and risk being blocklisted for that!).
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I'm manually resubbing all those Apple users today (which has its own email death-penalty risk), and if you are a subscriber and want to ensure that the mail isn't blocked, you can add the list address ([email protected]) to your address book.
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In the early days of the spamwars, open internet advocates warned that making it harder to send mail would lead to concentration and monopolization of the original federated channel, and that it would drive professionalization among spammers.
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Which is exactly where we've landed.
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