Would be nice to bring back the receive-rweekly-via-email option
davidkane9 opened this issue · comments
Does anyone on the rweekly team know approximately (to a magnitude of order) how many people were on the rweekly mailing list?
@gadenbuie eventually, yes. There's a long(ish) backstory but I do have an export and we have 4755 unique email addresses which were involved in the mailing list. Some are marked as unconfirmed, but if we are able to restart the mailings, we would start with those.
More generally, the lack of emails was because Feedburner shut down (#1180 (comment)) so it's "just" a matter of finding another service. I really would like to get this going so I'm open to suggestions. We need a service that can take the rendered HTML from each new post and email it out to the (managed) mailing list.
Mailchimp looks like it does what we want but with that number of addresses, it would be the paid subscription, and that looks expensive for 1 email a week.
The group has access to a small pool of Patreon funds but not at the level required for the higher tiers. Other alternative suggestions are most welcome.
As a stopgap, I recommend using Feedrabbit or similar as an RSS-to-email service. This is free for up to 10 feeds and will email you the content (perhaps not rendered perfectly, I'm not sure). I've added https://rweekly.org/atom.xml to mine and I'll see how it goes.
I recently bumped into https://sendy.co/ which uses Amazon SES for cheap email sending. Sendy advertises $1 per 10k emails.
I'd think you could use blastula and a service like these (probably with a decent amount of hand-rolled scripts) to send a the rweekly email newsletter. I also wouldn't blame you or rweekly if that's a bit out of reach or scope right now.
Sendy looks pretty cool, but self-hosting another app might be out of scope. The up-front cost there is $69 and I think that $1/10k is actually after the first $62k/month so ongoing costs would be nil. Rolling our own on SES also looks like a moderate amount of work https://medium.com/@ram.potham/bulk-email-sending-made-easy-and-free-with-aws-ses-1aa29a617310 but again would be zero cost at our scale.
As a stopgap, I recommend using Feedrabbit or similar as an RSS-to-email service. This is free for up to 10 feeds and will email you the content (perhaps not rendered perfectly, I'm not sure). I've added https://rweekly.org/atom.xml to mine and I'll see how it goes.
It's not the direct HTML, but it's not all that bad...
