Update: April 19, 2022 – After a seven month break after the email service fiasco with MailPoet, I’ve returned to MailerLite so I can do a newsletter again. The break was good. I could just delete this post, but I don’t do that. I wrote what I wrote below and now I’ve changed my mind. You can subscribe here.
Today I took another big step toward my commitment to returning to more old-fashioned blogging. I made the decision to cease maintaining an email list and writing a newsletter.
I’m sorry I didn’t let people know ahead of time. Some people only come here when they get an email notification from me so hopefully they eventually realize that they haven’t heard from me and come to see what’s going on. The lack of warning was part of what made me quit. I had been having issues with my email service and I decided I was just DONE. It wasn’t a snap decision. I had been thinking about it for at least a week. It was a kind of a last straw situation this morning when they told me I couldn’t email my list without jumping through a bunch of hoops due to spam flagging. At that moment, I knew that was IT.
So I spent today removing all the opt-in forms from my site, fixing all the posts and pages that were impacted by it, cancelling my email service, and removing the plugins. It might not sound like a big deal, but it took almost my entire day.
This was not a small decision from the business standpoint. It closes a lot of doors if you don’t have an email list. But I honestly decided I just didn’t care any longer.
My God is bigger than an email list.
So if you want to keep up on what I’m doing here, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. You can set a bookmark, add me to your Feedly, etc. If you have a way you like to receive updates from blogs, leave a comment. I’m sure there are ways to do it that I’m not even aware of and you can help others.
It is such an amazing feeling of freedom to no longer have to maintain all of it. Things like that suck me dry. I’m a writer who doesn’t write enough. Slowly eliminating things from my life is certainly helping.
I’m thankful.
And free.
Added: I have put an option in the sidebar to receive automatic notifications of new posts.