If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
I have a post sitting in my Notes app on my computer that I wrote on December 11. You may notice that I have not posted it. (This isn’t it, either.)
Before I could post it, I had to work my way through an annoying chain of interlinked process problems. This was complicated and hard, and made far more complicated and hard than it needed to be because… well, we’ll get to that.
See, I have a substantial number of people subscribed to get these posts in email. That system happened automatically via Mailchimp for a long time, but Mailchimp stopped supporting the plan I was on and the alternatives they offered were too expensive for my extremely modest email list purposes. So I thought, I’ll migrate to Substack, see what the big deal is about. There was even a post for that!
Right now there’s a mass exodus of writers from Substack because its owners have pretty much said they’re cool with hosting Nazis — literal Nazis, not that thing where you call ex. a mean ballet teacher a Nazi — and I also am unhappy about that! I do not want to patronize an entity that thinks Nazis are fine as long as they’re making money!
But also, principles aside, it turns out Substack kind of sucks for my purposes. Setting up an email of a blog post through Substack winds up being a tedious manual process that I was going to forget or screw up all the time. In fact, it was so tedious and awful that I didn’t do it at all for my last post — I think I blocked it out of my mind completely — and probably for a few posts before that, I dunno, I’m afraid to go look. But it’s rude not to send people reminders that you said you would! Also bad marketing practices or whatever! So I had to fix it and get those emails running smoothly again before the next post, which meant finding a new place to go and setting that up.
When I moved from Mailchimp to Substack it was mostly pretty easy; there was a neat import tool I could use. But I’d done a lot of the same research fairly recently, and now I decided to finally just bring it all under one roof and use Squarespace’s built-in email process, since Squarespace is the host that runs this website in the first place.
Nota bene: there are two different kinds of “email” happening here; one of them is outbound email — that’s the service that manages your email subscriber list and sends out to all of those people. The other one is inbound email, where you have an inbox and can look at the emails people send to you. These are completely different services, and generally speaking a company that does one (like Mailchimp) doesn’t do the other one (like Gmail.)
So to post my next post I had to first:
Sign up for Squarespace email marketing and pay them money (this was easy)
Authenticate the domain name so Squarespace would know it’s really mine (the emails come from andreaphillips.com and not deusexmachinatio.com because! Fun fact! If your URL has “sex” in the middle, a lot of email filters will automatically put you in spam!)
Authenticate the email address I wanted the emails to come from so Squarespace would know that was also really mine and really exists (see above)
Export my email lists from Substack (fine)
Import my email lists to Squarespace (also fine)
A little involved, but not so bad, right? Hah. HAH. HAHAHA! Here are the extra steps this involved.
Figure out where inbound email for that domain was already set up (…or was it?)
Fail, and set up inbound email (for the first time? Again? Who knows!)
Look at the instructions that tell you what you need to add to your domain’s nameserver records so it internets correctly
Figure out where my domain’s nameservers were managed (“DNS stuff” hereafter) because it wasn’t where I remembered
Fail and decide to just set up email somewhere else, where it will be much easier but slightly more expensive
Figure out why the domain isn’t authenticating in Squarespace email marketing when it authenticates just fine for my other Squarespace services
Finally figure out where my DNS stuff is managed and make some changes, which also means I still could have gone with the cheaper email service OH WELL
Realize it’s still not working right because I screwed up DNS a couple of steps ago screwing around on one of the wrong sites and go fix that
Try to log into the new email inbox and fail, before finding a temporary password they sent a week ago
Send a verification email, wonder why it isn’t showing up
Double-check all of the email settings
Check six other email accounts to see if you set up some weird forwarding ages ago and just didn’t remember
Dangit I should have just set up email forwarding instead of real email, that would have been easier and smarter and cheaper
Send a verification email, wonder why it isn’t showing up
Send an email to myself from another account. It works! Um.
Send a verification email, wonder why it isn’t showing up, vow to just… wait for a while and see what happens…
Write an optimistic post (this one!) assuming it’s going to just start working for real any time now. Any. Time. Now.
Contact Squarespace technical support, who tells you to do the things you did already. You do them again, but this time they work? Maybe?
Not pictured: The many, many places where I did not spell out the “gave up for a week” part.
Anyway if you’re actually reading this, that means I did eventually get it set up, despite everything, not least of all my own self. But we won’t know for sure until after this is posted, because we can’t send out the actual email until after that! So, uh, if you’re reading this in your email, everything is great? And maybe on Monday you’ll get to see the thing I wrote about how a novel is like a clock.
Or maybe not. Let’s find out together!
