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Your newsletter emails are a series of twisty passages, all alike

By Amy Hoy —
Screenshot of email footer with the line "If you'd like to sign up to get this humor newsletter, click here"

As part of my Leverage Year, I'm segregating my email inbox and moving all my newsletter subscriptions over to Newsletterss.

And… it's ROUGH.

I just want to change my email address.

Most newsletters I get only offer an option to Unsubscribe.

Then when I get to the Unsubscribe page, that's it. I'm unsubscribed, and there's no way to get back to the original site to resubscribe with my new email address.

And often times in the email itself, if there is a link to a web version, it's the version hosted on the ESP's site, not the writers' site, and there's no way to resubscribe from there either.

And a solid 70% of the time, there are no links in the email itself that lead back to the writers' site.

So I've been having to …

  1. go back to the email
  2. look at the sender's email address
  3. copy the domain name portion
  4. go back to my browser
  5. paste the domain name into the location bar
  6. hit Enter
  7. poke around the site til I find the subscription box

Freaking yikes!

Now some of the newsletters do have a link to update the subscription… and they're nearly all Convertkit customers. That's nice. I can edit the email address right there.

The few who aren't Convertkit customers? Well their idea of "updating my subscription" is limited to changing which emails I get, a euphemism for unsubscribe… they don't let me edit the damn address! They'll show it. But I can't change it.

This is all just so stupid.

And yeah sure, my use case is a bit odd… but you know where else this would collapse? When you forward the email to a friend. Are they gonna go thru all that work to find out how to subscribe? No they are not!

Only one of the newsletters I've migrated so far had a subscribe link at the bottom: Here For It, with R. Eric Thomas. (And it's well worth the sub, too.) Bravo, Eric.