First of all, distribution is not my problem. I already have an e-mail list service I’m happy with: Mail-List.com. I’ve been using them for years, and the service is great and reasonably priced. Best of all, this is a double opt-in e-mail list service, which I consider to be an absolutely vital feature of any e-mail publication I’m involved with. When you don’t have double opt-in, spammers and scammers take advantage. I don’t ever want to be accused of spamming people because some jerk abuses my system.

Right now, my blogging software (WordPress) would generate basically the same kind of e-mail newsletter that FeedBlitz would. But the problem would be that this would have to be one posting per e-mail newsletter, no way to do a biweekly or monthly summary. That means people would get pelted with an e-mail from me every time I posted a blog entry. I’m guessing that might not be popular.

What I really need is some automated way to scrape my site periodically and generate from that content for the body of an e-mail newsletter — without me having to copy, paste, and edit. That may not sound like much, but it is a significant task. Or if someone was willing to volunteer to perform that task, that would be fine too,

Maybe there is another solution, I’m open to suggestions. Here are my requirements:

1. Creation of the newsletter content must be automated, or done by someone other than me.
2. It must work with a double opt-in sysstem – either the one I already have (my preference) or another one that wouldn’t cost me anything more than what I’m already paying.

Ideas?

- Amy Gahran
Editor, Contentious