Tag: blog

Newsletter News, and a domain!

So, last month, new regulations went into effect that made it so I couldn’t send my newsletter from my Gmail account. As I understand it, the major email providers changed how they determine what is and isn’t spam, and sending a mass email from a free account made it very likely that said email would end up in the spam filter. The service that I use to format and send my newsletter, MailerLite, wouldn’t let me send out the newsletter until I registered a domain, created an email address for that domain, and verified and authenticated both the domain and the email.

After much deliberation, I upgraded my WordPress account. You may notice that there are no longer ads on this page! You may also notice that your bookmark or link to cranewrites.wordpress.com automatically redirects to spacewhalespress.com. You don’t need to update your bookmarks, unless you really want to.

Without further ado, the March edition of the newsletter is coming out at noon my time (US Central Daylight) on Sunday, March 31, and should continue to come out at noon on the last day of the month for the foreseeable future. If you aren’t subscribed yet, and need more cat pictures in your life, you can do so at this link. There’s another link down at the bottom of the page, under the WordPress subscription button (bottom right on desktop, all the way down on mobile).

Thanks for your patience! Have a good weekend.

No newsletter this month

I am working on getting the newsletter back on track, but for now, I’m unable to send it. Google and Yahoo have changed their policies, making it more likely that emails sent from free accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) will end up in a spam trap. MailerLite has made the decision to ban free email accounts from sending emails with their service. I thought I had managed a workaround by using the account the university gave me back in the day, but that is no longer viable. I have to 1) purchase a domain, 2) use that domain to get a new email address, and 3) register and verify all this with MailerLite. At this point, I’m reluctant to add another recurring charge to my budget, but it looks like I’m being forced to do so in order to keep the newsletter running. Prevailing wisdom says that authors need to have a newsletter. Who am I to argue?

In any case, I’m not going to be able to get this sorted out before the month ends in…fifteen hours? So I’ll skip this month and hopefully have a newsletter to send at the end of March. Thank you so much for your patience! In the meantime, MailerLite is maintaining the subscriber list, so you won’t need to sign up again.

If you’d like to help out with operational costs, and are able to do so, I have a Patreon and a Ko-fi. You can also buy one or more of my books! In any case, I appreciate you.