Too Soon Old, Too Late Schmart

I’m sitting in a Zoom meeting, and the topic is the organization’s newsletter. I know a thing or two about newsletters. I’ve sent one out regularly to thousands of readers for about the past ten years. I follow the people who obsess on newsletter hygiene (fancy term for scrubbing the addresses that never open the email), open rates, click-through-rates, on-boarding, re-boarding, and off-boarding readers… tricky business, those newsletters. I am also a lawyer and a business owner, so when the European Union passed the General Data Protection Requirements (GDPR) in 2018, I read the requirements, and shifted my practices to comply with that law. That’s why you don’t get my newsletter unless you sign up for it and confirm that you signed up for it (double opt-in), and why with every newsletter, there’s an unsubscribe link in the email itself. The GDPR law is why my website has a privacy policy anybody can read. California has also passed a GDPR-ish law, and their watchdog has collected…