Sending the RoseBouquet from a New Place

Yes, the transition I hinted at is in full-swing!

You may recall that two weeks ago I described my email listing Muddle, and that I was planning to find a new - hopefully better mailing list service for this weekly email to my faithful friends. Well, I did some research the next day and discovered about six such services that looked like good possibilities. Each of them had a free membership, some for 14 days, some for 30 and some forever!

That is actually a good way to try out a service like this because will have some unique ways of doing things, and you don't know what you'll think until you try it out. Also, sometimes the level of support is the pits. They can be awfully slow, or their staff don't understand when you try to explain a problem you are having.

Well, I made notes on these first ones I found. (Actually, I think I had more than six at first, but when I went to study their features, etc, again, I cross off a few). Then on Thursday last week I went over the ones left on my shorter list, and choose MailerLite as the first one I would try.

In fact I had tried them out in the summer/fall of 2021, and just took their free online video academy, to see how they did things. Mainly I was impressed, but they had more features than I thought I would ever need. Also, when I tried to start a list that I had in my mind, they insisted on authenticaing the domain registration of the site which was to be the home base for that list. That meant I had to interact by email with their support dept. But they were able to show me how to do that. However, I was busy with my big project of rebuilding my websites and decided to put off that list idea. Furthermore, I rather liked my routine and simple way of getting the RoseBouquet out as a plain text email from the Service I'd signed up in December of 2012. That's 10 years!

That is one issue I may have to work out with this new List service. They really like to stress that they have all kinds of lovely graphics for your newsletters. But graphics means the email is full of hidden codes. Spammers and hackers can hide viruses in that code! Which is why some ordinary email programs won't allow HTML emails to come in. My program, KMail, allows me to choose whether I will accept such emails or stick to plain text only, and always with a warning that viruses can be sent hidden in the HTML code of a dressy email full of pictures, backgrounds, etc. So I've learned to stick to plain text in my emails for my safety and those of my recipients.

Yesterday I managed to open a new free account at MailerLite, and even got my lists of subscribers' emails and names loaded - so that's all ready to go. But whether I can insist on plain text here, that I don't know yet! If I'm forced to go to full colour and whiz-bang graphics, you can bet I will be trying a different mailing list next week.

I hope you won't bail out and unsubscribe while I go through this phase of finding a new home for the RoseBouquet. I plan to take good care of you - my dear Bouquet of Roses!

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