Thank you to those who use Gmail and participated in our recent research project. We asked Gmail users who signed up for the Daily Grok if they were getting their emailed newsletter every day. Those who responded were not. Gmail appears to be embargoing our content.
I checked the newsletter plugin send history for the emails provided in each instance. They were being sent every day, but the recipients were not getting them, and they were not in spam. Whitelisting did not help.
I am at a loss for how to proceed. Google doesn’t have to explain itself to me, so all I can do is share what we have found with the world and see if they have the same issue. If you are a center-right new media concern with a newsletter or content that gets emailed, are your Gmail users receiving it?
You’d best ask. I’m sure many are, but then some may not, and I lack the time or resources to pursue this past the following. For those willing to do it, I’d suggest opening a free proton mail account and signing up for the newsletter using that address.
Please.
We rely on increasing traffic to generate ad revenue, above donations, which are many and generous (and we appreciate every dollar) but not enough to cover every expense. Our 2024 budget is not yet fully funded. We can pick at that with increased traffic, which we might get if Google didn’t appear to block access to our newsletter.
We have more than a few folks who only come to the site because of that newsletter. To those folks, please visit the site at least once daily if you are not interested in setting up a separate email to bypass Google’s censorship. We’d appreciate it, and you’d get to read the content you wanted all along.
We will let you know if anything changes about Gmail and our newsletter. If you are a Gmail user getting the newsletter in Gmail, please let us know. Perhaps there’s a “secret handshake” we can share with readers to assist them in resolving the issue.
[Update] A reader has informed me that he used his Hotmail account to subscribe and is not receiving these either. I verified that our application has been sending him the newsletter daily. If I read it correctly, Microsoft owns Hotmail, which is the Windows Outlook mail service with the vestigial @Hotmail extensions for existing users (before 2012). We’ll test this against Outlook and see what happens. As for the reader, he says he is opening a free Protonmail account, and we appreciate that.
