Today I'd like to talk about bouncing. As in e-mail. Like many other e-zine publishers I have been wrestling with the problem of Web mail programs like Hotmail and Yahoo.
The good news about these services is that they are free. The bad news is that they give you only a very small freebie mailbox. If you don't empty that small mailbox, nothing else fits in it and your weekly issue of CC Tips bounces back to me. About three quarters of the CC Tips bounces come from Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. As CC Tips grows in popularity, the problem grows along with it.
Some e-zine publishers are so fed up with this problem that they no longer permit people to sign up using these freebie accounts. Other publishers don't go quite that far, but suggest somewhat emphatically that you use your *work* account.
Frankly, I can't quite decide what to do. It seems unreasonably restrictive to prohibit hotmail and yahoo subscribers. I know quite a few people who only use yahoo accounts because they got sick of changing e-mail addresses every time they changed ISPs, or the ISP merged, died, or otherwise discombobulated their e-mail domain.
So, I'll just make a quiet request: if you have signed up for this e-zine, please, please clean out your in box regularly. Bouncing e-mail is a boring thing. |
