And now I need your help. But first, more of the “tragic” story. 🙄
On Friday (9 April 2021, for history’s sake) I posted to my Thoughts for the Week email list:
It promptly bounced back as having gone to an invalid address. 😟 What!
It didn’t take me long to discover the cause. I was just crestfallen. (Maybe that should be in the present tense.) 🤢 You see, if I had realized that YahooGroups would be vanishing, I would have retrieved all those subscriber email addresses. 😥
I am sure YahooGroups (owned by Verizon) tried to warn me. But apparently the heads-up went to a rarely checked email address of mine. 👎 It appears I didn’t know they would remove all YahooGroups from the Web in December 2020.
So, after 20+ years, I no longer have access to all those slowly accumulated subscriber addresses. 😭
I try to rest in that.
🙂
Now I need to decide whether to start over or just take the loss as some sort of “divine sign” to give up “Thoughts for the Week” once and for all.
If I were to start over, who should I depend on for the mailing list service this time?
I finally set up a Mailchimp account. Then learned I had to provide my mailing address so they could append it to the bottom of every email I send through their service. No. Thanks.
So I caved in a little bit. 🙄 Just enough to set up a mailing list on Google Groups. 😳 But not enough to actually start using it. 😀
Is there some other outfit you would recommend instead? (See? I told you I need your help.)
It needs to be free. (Yes, your help. But also the mailing list service.)
But what is that Thoughts for the Week stuff?!
Back in the 1990s and into the first decade of the new millennium, I wrote the “Applications for Youth” portion of the youth Sunday School quarterly published by Christian Light Publications of Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Somewhere in mid-1999 (if not before), I started emailing those to opt-in subscribers to something I called “Thoughts for the Week.” By mid-September 2002, I distributed my current Sunday School comments to over 2300 subscribers. At its peak, my subscriber list exceeded 7000 addresses (though 2000+ were invalid ones by then).
Then Christian Light decided to quit using the International Sunday School Lessons scope and sequence. That meant my subscribers now belonged to churches that used two different Sunday School lesson series. I gamely kept up with both.
At the end of 2016, I finally had to quit doing the weekly emailings. I could no longer afford that much time away from my for-pay work. By then, the list was down to somewhat less than 6900 subscribers where it stayed (more or less):
From 2017 on, I did very sporadic emailings to the list. Then a week ago or so (some seven months after the previous such email), I decided I would try doing weekly emailings with much less content and links to the full content. So, I did the aforementioned emailing this past Friday. And now we’ve gone full circle. 🙂
Just to be clear, I did not lose all the stuff I wrote. It’s archived in my computers as well as on my Anabaptists site.