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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"I didn’t build up a mailing list. At one point I had almost 20,000 people subscribing via Feedburner. Imagine if I had converted half of them to email subscribers. That would have been a huge platform to work from. And email is the single most effective way of communicating with people online."

I don't get it. I'm on like 27 mailing lists from places where I bought something or had to set up an account for some reason, and the first thing I do is set up a filter that shovels their traffic into thr trash.

Why does everyone say, set up a mailing list?

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> I'm on like 27 mailing lists from places where I bought something or had to set up an account for some reason, and the first thing I do is set up a filter that shovels their traffic into thr trash.

You're not the average user. Many (not that many but enough) will see "hot new deal! don't miss out!" and click it.

Because most people want to read what you publish. No further explanation needed.

Now, being included on a mailing list because you bought something is a dick move. However, most people dont mind.

I agree. I am on a lot of blog's mailing lists. I follow them for a month and see where it goes. The key is keeping your mails short (or extremely attention retentive) and relevant. Pocket's (https://getpocket.com) mailing lists are also interesting if you like varied content.

You forgot "not annoyingly frequent." I don't necessarily want to be emailed every time someone comments on a post I commented on, or whenever you post something new. Once a week or once a month, in digest form telling me what's new is more than sufficient.

Weather West (weatherwest.com) does a great job with this. The posts are information dense, topical, and timely. And, best of all, not overly frequent unless weather events warrant it. I wish more blogs operated this way.

I do the list on buy thing and the first email people get is "If you don't want this, unsubscribe now [big fat link]"

Almost nobody takes me up on it. My guess is they care about the free updates and such.

The reason I do this is because I too once made the mistake of not building a mailing list for a moderately popular blog.

are you sure the link works? I'm frustrated, but not really surprised, by the amount of email I get where the unsubscribe link returns a 404 or 500 error on submission. I'd say it's close to 20% of all unsubscribe links are non-functional.

Also, I've noticed a large number of "unsubscribe" links are actually "proof that someone is reading this mailbox" links. I've had email addresses I had to walk away from because I clicked too many unsubscribe links that resulted in lots of more "subscriptions"

My guess is that people have been burned by unsubscribe links so much that they mostly don't use them. I'd prefer to set up a filter on my side than have to trust that some spam sender is going to do the right thing.

CAN-SPAM only requires a link in the email, but nothing about a working link. Often times, those links do indeed trigger a "someone reads this mailbox" and add you to other mailing lists (yes, plural). I worked with a dev who had been at a "marketing" company and explained this stuff.

I wonder how many people just delete that mail without even consciously reading far enough. I've observed some interesting cases of "banner blindness" in myself with helpful information that was too big and fat...

Furthermore, something like Gmail does a pretty reliable job of automatically putting a lot of newsletters and the like into a tab that I can just skim once a day or so. I used to use a Yahoo address for a lot of the mailing lists or online specials that I signed up for.

Now I pretty much just use Gmail because the vast majority never hits my primary inbox tab and I can just train it to be even better over time. It avoids the mental energy associated with deciding whether I want to unsubscribe to something that I might potentially be interested in from time to time (although in practice I almost never look at it.)

Good point.

But hey, every email I send has an unsub link and the unsub rate is around half a percent. I can live with that and apparently so can my audience.

However though, are the other 99.5% actually seeing your mails, or have most of them just blacklisted your domain and your mails now go to junk automatically?

I think the blacklisting/mark-as-spam is MUCH more prevalent than people unsubscribing due to the harvesting of active email addresses (as mentioned above).

This of course is hard to know. My open rates are in the 30% to 35% range for normal weekly stuff and shoot up to 60% for special events.

I don't think too many people have blacklisted me yet.

FWIW - I'm on your list and find your content's signal to noise ratio pretty high. I like how you continually push yourself to learn new things, and bring the reader along on your journey.

In England retailers are now asking for your email address to send you a receipt (partly so they can integrate you with stuff like LiveRamp too).

How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him

I prefer using twitter instead of a mailing list. People opt in if they want, and opt out when they want. Everybody's happy.

> People opt in if they want, and opt out when they want.

How is this different from a mailing list?

It's possible that both are true. 20k people is such an insanely small number of people in the scheme of things that it's possible that there are many people who, like you, filter this stuff straight to the trash - and that there are still many many 20ks to go round.

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