Trying Out Emails

Let's start with a photo of Buckaroo Banzai simply because he's cute.  But he has nothing to do with the rest of this post.  

I've spent the last month poking around this whole email feedburner thing.  I moved my email followers off of feedburner to Follow.it.  Hated it.  Disliked the way the email looked, was unhappy how the emails and rss feed were delayed by 12-24 hours and I'd have to pay to get some basic stuff.  What?  No. 

(I also tried Feed.io which looked great on the surface, but never got it to work.)

Researched some more.  Initially I wanted email and rss, but feedburner is supposedly leaving the rss feed as is.  So I focused strictly on the email.  I've seen MailChimp and stumbled across AWeber.  I decided to give that a try.  My email subscribers would have seen the change last week. 

MailChimp and AWeber offer free solutions to emailing blog posts for people that a relatively small number of followers (2,000/500) for a limited number of emails a month (10,000/3,000).  Perfect.  Even though AWeber has lower thresholds than MailChimp, I decided to give it a try.  The emails look a whole lot better than the stuff I was sending from Follow.it.  Makes sense - they're aiming at a different audience.  There were wizards to set up the email and the subscribe button (which had more code than I wanted, but I don't know enough html to rewrite it).  Emails fire off when the blog is posted (rather than delaying up to a day).  I even have the option to post stuff automatically to social media.  The interface allowed me to easily import my email list.

However. 

Both of these are marketing services.  I don't know about MailChimp, but AWeber required a decent amount of setup.  There was a lot of stuff that I ignored or navigated around because I'm not interested in marketing to people - that's not the purpose.  The thing I disliked the most is due to anti-spamming laws:  all emails must contain a physical address.  There's no way to suppress that.  I found several articles with options of how not to include your home address, but this is not something I'm happy about.  By default it tried to post it in two places in the email - I managed to strip it down to just one spot at the bottom.

Should I be bothered about this?  I don't know.  My email following is a whopping 29 people (including me because I'm testing the emails).  It's not like I'm broadcasting my location to hundreds of people.  And hell - I have enough of an online presence, it takes only a few minutes with Google to obtain my home address.  Where I live is not a secret.  But I'm bummed.  I don't want to have to navigate services and setups for something that had been an extension for being social on the web.  It took a lot of research, learning and time to set this up this point.  I'm using this service not quite as it's intended - how long before AWeber decides I'm not the type of customer they want and change this, too?  I'm publishing more information than I intended, linked directly to this blog.  I know there area large group of bloggers stuck like this, too.  So I know I'm not alone!  (and you know where to find me... LOL)

I will be interested on how other bloggers address this, or if they just force their email followers to move to rss (that would be easier!).