* Because other platforms own you, but you own your newsletter.
* Not everyone opens a newsletter, but everyone checks their email. So if they don't open the newsletter, at least they see something from you.
* It's near zero cost.
I don't like it when sites push their newsletter constantly, but I do like educational content pushed to where I often am (my inbox).
Citation needed. Absolutely not the case in my experience. And while I check my email, I delete 80% of it unread, based on the subject line/sender only.
If you're only checking your email to use the "search" function for something very specific, or to find an expected transactional email sent within the last minute, there's not much reason to bother setting up filters.
Text is probably the best way for non-friends to get through to me, because I mostly ignore email and calls since they're overrun with crap, though the current campaign season is really trying to make text useless, too. So many damn fundraising texts, usually from candidates in other states entirely.
Newsletter that I didn't subscribe to? One strike, you're out (unsubscribe and occasionally report as spam).
Updates from sites I care about (e.g. bank, HOA, etc) that come more than once a year? Create an email filter (gmail -> filter messages like this), skip inbox, never mark as important, apply label XYZ.
These simple hygiene measures don't take more than a few minutes each week and save tons of time and focus.
You got me! :) I guess just 1 out of every 2 human beings checks email. The denominator includes folks without computers or phones too.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-mail-...
In fact, this article: https://phrasee.co/blog/a-brief-history-of-email/
says the following:
With over 2.6 billion active users and over 4.6 billion email accounts in operation, email is the most important and widely used communications medium on the internet.
Your newsletter is owned by a massive corporate platform such as Mailchipm, which will ban you for wrongthink/wrongspeak just like other massive corporate platforms like Facebook.
Just the first news story I found: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1017221 - keep in mind that “antivaxxer” doesn’t mean what it used to mean but could simply mean you’re pointing out that vaccines aren’t 100% safe or 100% effective which is absolutely true but was considered fake news by mainstream propaganda a year or so ago. Besides the point but I expect I’ll get some replies so just noting preemptively.
Switching providers sometimes requires all existing subscribers to “opt in” again.
Regardless you’re still owned by a platform. Gmail ain’t gonna let you deliver 1000s of emails yourself.
There is a clear difference between lock in to a single provider and their commercial interests and strategy and the possibility that your content might fall foul of a number of providers.
For many email is a much less risky option than alternatives. Do you have a better option?
Others could require everyone opt in again, but most of the email providers don't require this.
People move their list to another provider all the time; very starkly different from a bunch of followers on a social platform.
But you have far far more options to take your subscriber list and go to a different provider (substack, tinyletter) or even build your own solution using something like mailgun or AWS SES. (Yes, that latter option would be quite a bit of work, but if you had, say, 20k email subscribers, it might be worth it.)
If you get kicked off twitter or facebook or even a place like HN or Lobste.rs, you have exactly zero ability to export the contact info of people who knew you and want to continue to hear from you.
* making sure I followed the best practices (DMARC, DKIM, etc).
* building IP reputation. Not sure how SES does with deliverability, but I know that can be an issue.
* email clients rendering of my newsletter. This could by using text only, I suppose. That might work depending on your audience.
Again, though, at least you have the option of building your own solution when you have a newsletter.
The difference between you and Amazon is that Amazon can deal with Gmail by picking up the phone. You aren’t even going to get as far as ‘talk to the hand’.
You can do all the things like DKIM right and still go straight to spam. If you’re a real DIY fanatic you’ll run your mail server at home or some other IP address which is doomed from the viewpoint of deliverability and be too stubborn to change it.
The SES/Dynamo/Lambda system is perfectly balanced for email lists that generate a huge amount of traffic for short bursts but still need to handles bounces and subscribe/unsubscribe requests whenever they come in, even if you don’t feel like getting around to rebooting the server stuffed under your bed. If you try to do it on a conventional server you need to pay for a lot more server if you don’t want it to get overloaded at peak load.
Making sure you avoid spam traps, fraudulent signups, purchased lists, spammy campaigns and all that are most of the work. Even if your customers are internal only, what happens when one of your salespeople uploads a sketchy email list they got from who knows where.
I've worked at an ESP before and you'd be very surprised how many smart people are just working on the spam detection.
* Email HTML is gnarly. Hope you like tables. The vast majority of web developers aren't equipped to write email HTML for something as simple as a button and have it render correctly in all email clients.
* Things get much more complicated when you need to email a large number of people (say 10s of thousands - very real for a lot of newsletters) and want to both personalize your content (e.g. add unsubscribe links) and not take 30 minutes to email all your subscribers.
* The metrics you get with SES are extremely barebones. Makes Sendgrid look incredible, and that's saying something. Deliverability and inboxing will be even more of a black box than usual.