Last Friday, I was greeted in the morning with an email from a woman who was trying to sign up for my newsletter and getting an error page. I discovered that the commercial email company handling my mailing list went out of business. Not only that, the new company who had bought out the old assured me that my email list existed in my new account, but they had no new account for me, and my list had disappeared forever, and at any rate they had sent me an email about the transfer a month ago. I didn’t believe any of this was true, but I still asked my web host to go through my incoming email for the past six months and they could find no such email from the old company or the new. Assigning blame is pointless, though. I don’t have the list. I scrambled the rest of the day to set up a new commercial mail account and update my web page.
Fortunately I did make a backup, never in a million years thinking I would need it for this purpose, although the backup is older than I would like. Between my backup file and other sources, I will be putting it back together again. People who have signed up for my infrequent newsletters will get a notice saying they have been added to the new list. Don’t delete the email and don’t report it as spam. Click the link and verify that you have voluntarily joined the mailing list. If you want to save me some headache and typing, click the “newsletter” link and sign up yourself. It’s under the book picture at the top of the home page.
Putting together a mailing list is going to take me some time, but I didn’t have anything I wanted to say in an email at the moment anyway, except “Happy Yule,” and I am no longer in the holiday spirit. Mercury retrograde. What else is there to say?