I had a newsletter for this blog automatically created from the RSS feed and sent by Mailchimp, based on Julia Evans’ setup. I discovered this week, thanks to Ringo, that sign-ups no longer worked. Upon digging further, I found out that my Mailchimp account was deleted over an year ago. I missed a handful of email reminders from them to login to the account to prevent deletion.

I didn’t need to tweak or change anything with the newsletter on Mailchimp once everything was satisfactorily set-up. For a service that provides an automatic service, asking users to login to prove that the account is active is a dark pattern that’s more than just “mildly inconvenient”. Emails are easy to miss or get lost “in transit” given how they work. Relying on users taking action in response to emails before deleting their data is horrid. But I guess I shouldn’t expect much more for a service I wasn’t paying for.

The newsletter had about 25-30 subscribers, if I remember correctly, the last time I checked maybe ~3 years ago. It’s not a lot, but I definitely have had some people writing to me that they enjoyed some editions! I’ve restored the newsletter functionality using a hack-ish setup, now, thanks to Claude Code.

I’ve signed up to Resend for sending out the newsletter. I considered using my own mailserver to send out these emails, but I know email service providers are usually not happy with bulk email coming out from servers/domains without enough “reputation” behind them.

To prevent any future data loss ala Mailchimp, I’ve used “the baali trick” (term coined by Claude Code) for setting up the sign-up form using a Google Form that write responses to a spreadsheet that gets synced to Resend’s subscriber list. Unsubscribe is automatically handled by Resend and the data about who unsubscribed is not synced back to the spreadsheet. Thi is the only thing I’d be losing if a mailchimp like mishap occured again.

The newsletter gets sent out every Thursday using a GitHub action. I wonder if I should automatically add the details of those I knew subscribed previously (but may have unsubscribed), or ask them if they’d like to be “re-subscribed”. If you’d like to receive (at the most) weekly emails from me, containing posts from this blog, you can sign up here.