Hugo Email Subscription

Why an email subscription

Talking to a friend, he said, cool blog, fun to keep up with what you are doing. I should be able to subscribe, a email reminder about changes would keep me coming back.

the rabbit hole

I am an email expert. I know smtp inside and out. I run my own servers, I can reliably deliver email to all the main providers. Email delivery is hard, even harder if you are sending bulk mail (IE: subscription/content updates). I kicked off a bunch of research.

Providers (mailchimp, mailgun, constant contact, amazon ses)

All of the main email subscription/content update providers are large companies that specialize in managing and sending information to your subscription list. This is fine, however they are plagued with the common tech marketplace challenge, Make a business, up sell everything, and show growth. I am not against growth or up selling, however I don’t need subscriber workflows, AI generated marketing, shopping cart integration. I simply need a form that will collect a email address, do verification that email entered belongs to the subscriber and automatic sending when my rss feed updates. All the main providers can do this, however getting a reasonably priced service for delivering a few hundred emails a month is challenging.

I considered doing this myself. Setting up the required APIs, maintaining a list, sending verification emails, building a crud interface for managing the users and emails. However I quickly came to the conclusion that it would be a management challenge. If my list gets big enough I will re-evaluate.

the service I choose:

After some digging around for simple email delivery services I found a good implementation at rssfeedpulse. The service checks my index.xml for changes, collects email addresses via a form and does verification of the emails entered from the form. I think I pay one dollar per month for the service which I find reasonable. I have emailed the RSSFeedPulse team a few times on concerns I had, each interaction has left me with a good feeling. The team thanked me for my reports and quickly addressed crucial changes.

If you would like email or rss feed updates. Visit the Subscribe page