And that brings us neatly to the subject of drugs. I’m glad you asked me that question, Adrian. 

Actually, of course Adrian’s query wasn’t anything to do with drugs, but was about the service I use to send out my newsletter. The newsletter is as old-fashioned as it sounds: simply a mailout to people who’ve signed up. There’s no forum, or mailing list, or archive. Just the emails that appear, with reasonable frequency, in your inbox. 

And here’s where I remind you that, if you have signed up, yes I probably can work out who you are from your email address, but it’s not going to cause me terrible angst if you unsubscribe. Really, you can unsubscribe. It’s fine. I won’t mind. 

I’d thought about running a newsletter for some time. For a long time, in fact. It was one of the anything-but-Twitter options I had my eye on. Google Groups were too Googly. Proper standalone mailing lists seemed a bit too cliquey. I wanted something that just came from me, to you. Nothing in-between. All yours, to do what you wanted with. A straight mailout seemed like the best option. 

I had a look at some of the venerable open-source options, such as Mailman, both on my own server and as a hosted service. Running my own instance on a server seemed a little beyond me: check out Giles Turnbull’s gorjuss mailing list as an example of what you can do if you actually know what you’re doing. I didn’t. The hosted services all looked a bit … outdated? Like the people who ran them had forgotten they’d ever installed the stuff in the first place. 

Almost all of the commercial hosted mailing services seemed to be aimed at direct marketing, rather than a small personal newsletter. Fine if you like that sort of thing, but not for me. 

I’m not sure quite where of when I first heard of Tinyletter. It may have been indirectly through Pud, the person who actually wrote the first version of the service. Originally, it was just for his own newsletter, but was then launched as a service aimed at relatively small lists that paid for email – usually not large sums, but still money. 

At some stage, Pud sold Tinyletter to Mailchimp, already a well-established mailing service. Mailchimp is huge. Really, huge. They announced the sale and an upcoming rewrite of the code. A few months later: Tinyletter 2.0 emerged. It was … fine. Really. It’s fine. But, but. I, personally, have a few issues with it. Admittedly I had issues with Tinyletter 1.0, as well. 

Now, you have to remember that a mailing service, of any real size, isn’t a straightforward proposition. A lot of the ‘business process’ ends up being external. And my experience so far has been: there’s no better small-scale service than Tinyletter – and no better scaled service than Mailchimp. 

That said, I wish Tinyletter was better. Even better! As far as I can make out, the back-end has been beefed-up and the front end smartened-up. Which is great. But for me, the front end is now a little too smart. Hash-bang URLs, when everyone else is moving away from them, have been introduced. Someone’s clearly really into modal popups. Nice, but not on most of the screen sizes I use. And, saddest of all, the JavaScript load often times out if I’m not on a good connection. What that means, to me, is that Tinyletter doesn’t work if all I have is an iPhone and 3G, which is most of the time. Sometimes it doesn’t even work over ADSL. I suppose it works fine if you’re on a laptop with a fast enough connection, which perhaps is Tinyletter’s core audience. It doesn’t feel like its made for people with smaller screens or slower networks. 

Mailchimp is, as I say, huge. It’s one of the fullest-featured services I’ve ever even heard of, let alone tried to use. Pretty much every possible thing you could think of that you’d want to do with a mailing list is there, together with some I imagine few had even dreamed of before Mailchimp came along. 

The good news is, if you want to do it, you probably can. The slightly less good news is that unless you’re happy with the out-of-the-box configuration, you’re likely to have to spend some time setting the whole thing up. But when you have, it’ll most likely be near to perfect. 

Mailchimp has a free account, which has some basic limitations as to how much mail you can send every month; but it’s still quite a lot. I’m looking to go onto a paid-for account as soon as I can, since there’s one limitation to the free account I just can’t bear – Mailchimp masks my URLs in plain text messages! That is, it changes the URLs I type in to it’s own special ones that allow clicks to be tracked. Which is fine, but it looks dreadful and I don’t want that. One of the reasons I moved away from Twitter is that I really didn’t much like the URLs being shortened and masked behind the t.co domain. I, like many people I know, want to know what I’m clicking on. 

I’d recommend Tinyletter if you have a reasonably dependable connection, you use a standard modern browser and you’re not looking for anything more than plain text and pretty basic stats. Tinyletter is a free service at the time of writing. 

I’d recommend Mailchimp if your requirements tend towards the complex, you want more analytics, styled emails and so on. Mailchimp also has a comprehensive API and several apps for iOS, if you’re into that kind of thing. I regard the prices of the Mailchimp accounts as reasonable. 

So what’s next? Well, I still intend to move over to Mailchimp from Tinyletter. I’ll try again, once I’m on a paid-for account and I’ve sorted out the URL masking thing, which for me was a real showstopper. Hopefully it’ll be done by the end of May. 

Thanks to Adrian Short.