Ditching my email newsletters

I'm signing up for email newsletters like it's 1999.

— Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt) August 16, 2011

According to my Twitter history, I signed up for a bunch of email newsletters in 2011. I can kind of infer from my Gmail history that it took about a year before I realized that I never read the email newsletters. One day I purged them all, likely thinking it would be nice to have a less cluttered inbox.

I hate on email every day but I like my email newsletters. 🙂

— Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt) April 3, 2015

Because history repeats itself, I signed up for a whole ton of email newsletters again in 2015. Gmail's tabbed inbox interface made me think I could better organize these newsletters under the "Updates" tab and read them every day. At that point I even asked for recommendations so that I could receive even more email!

This is all ridiculous because I'm bad at reading email.

Recently, I decided to blog more and to embrace the blog ecosystem again. This means I'm trying to consume interesting stuff through an RSS reader (currently Feedly) rather than through Twitter or email.

So today I'm unsubscribing from a bunch of email and subscribing to their RSS equivalents. I mostly wanted to write this to note how appreciative I am of the people who provide an RSS feed in addition to the email version.

It looks like MailChimp makes it really easy. Others are published first on a blog or news site anyway. And there are only a few that are going to require figuring out a way to get them into Feedly through some kind of process.

Getting these all into an interface that's designed more for reading won't always help direct my attention to them. But they'll at least be in a place more likely to succeed. 🙂