Are you getting too many emails from Breaking Free?

In: Updates By: Brian Armstrong

23 Oct 2008

The email subscriptions for Breaking Free are handled by FeedBurner, and I’ve always wished they would provide an option to send out email updates weekly.

As it is right now, email updates go out as soon as a new post is made. So about once a day if you post that much (a couple times per week in my case).

I’ve always thought this was a little too often and was afraid of annoying my readers with too many emails. Unfortunately, FeedBurner doesn’t offer an option to send them out weekly. I would have to switch over to another service like Aweber or Feedblitz (which is pretty bad) to get a weekly email going out.

So I decided to put together a little poll. Are you getting too many email from Breaking Free?

Note: click here if you don’t see the poll, you will have to visit the actual web page.

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Of course if you are subscribed via the RSS feed then this question doesn’t really apply to you. By the way, if you don’t know what RSS is, check out this YouTube video:

I understand some people prefer to get email updates, but I personally use Google Reader for all the blogs I read and it is much better I think.

You can click here to subscribe by RSS if you’d like to try it out instead of email.

Tags: email delivery, poll, schedule email

12 Responses

Caroline typing from home

October 24th, 2008 at 5:58 am

No, because I prefer visiting the site from my RSS reader. Many of the emails I get are often buried and I never see them:( so too many emails in general but not from here.

bdurfee

October 24th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

Your emails are among the very few I bother reading when I’m busy. Even if what you’re writing about doesn’t pertain to anything I’m currently doing, I enjoy it because I like your writing style. So… don’t change a thing.

Brian Armstrong

October 24th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

Wow, I really appreciate that. Thank you!
Brian

Nuts

October 24th, 2008 at 9:45 pm

Yes, I also prefer to be immediately and regularly updated. Your information inspires me and gives me practical advice on how to build my own business. Why would I want to limit this? Keep up the good work!

Brian Armstrong

October 25th, 2008 at 5:19 pm

This is good, thanks for letting me know otherwise I might have changed it!

nicogranelli

October 25th, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Do you think that Feedblitz is pretty bad?

Yesterday I was doing a research for a web based mailing software. I know that aweber is very good, but I was trying to find alternatives.

Is that simply? aweber or nothing good?

Brian Armstrong

October 25th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

I tried Feedblitz at one point and thought it was pretty horrible. If I ever wrote a book on user interface design, I would use Feedblitz as a case study on what NOT to do. It was confusing and difficult, and I also had a major problem when I tried to cancel the service.

Aweber is better but there were still some things I didn’t like about it. Their “blog broadcast” feature (which is basically the main thing I was going to use to send out my blogs newsletter) was really buggy and felt half finished. After weeks I was still unable to get a branded email to generate that actually displayed correctly, pulled my feeds correctly, etc.

The feedburner email service is actually far better in most ways (and free) except for that one issue of scheduled delivery. Oh well!

nicogranelli

October 31st, 2008 at 3:19 pm

Thanks you for the answer

Brian Armstrong

October 25th, 2008 at 5:26 pm

Thanks everyone for your votes and comments! This is a relief to know that the majority of you prefer to get them as they come out (since it would be difficult to change that right now!)

What I’m hoping is that in the future, Feedburner will provide an option for the end user to select how often they would like to receive it (and the default for new subscribers would be “as they come out”). I will let you know if they add this feature down the road!

Thanks!
Brian