Feedburner sent me an email which I deleted unread. To me a feed burner is an 1800 lb cow that weans a 500 lb calf at 200 days when she needs to wean a 900 lb calf to be worth keeping. Today when I went to my Blogger dashboard, lo and behold (my favourite neckline on Dolly Parton), there was an important message from Feedburner. Who know?
Feedburner is the provider of the "subscribe by email" gadget that some of you have taken advantage of. It looks like this on my blog. (To enable Follow by Email, click the
Add a Gadget link from the Design Page Elements tab, and then select the Follow by Email gadget which should be at the top of the list. Once you add the gadget, readers visiting your blog can then just enter their email address and click Submit.) They are discontinuing the service in July. They tell you how to save your subscribers to a CSV (spreadsheet file) so you can import them into a new email service.
Their directions are less than helpful so I will give them so you and also show you what I found.
Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be
discontinued in July 2021. After July 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but
the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported. If you’d
like to continue sending emails, you can download your subscriber contacts.
To view these stats, log into Feedburner.com (https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds),
and select the appropriate blog feed from your list.
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When you open Feedburner, click on your blog name
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| Under Analyze, click on Subscribers |
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| Click on Feedburner Email Subscriptions |
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| Click on Manage your Email Subscription List |
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| You will get a list of your subscribers. Click export CSV |
Since there is no way I have 950 legitimate subscribers, I found where the bots have been hiding. If you click on Email Addresses as shown above, you get a list of bots in alphabetical order like this.
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| All the email addresses started with eg ACEDO, most are @Outlook and dated 2017. |
On the CVS spreadsheet, I sorted by active and unverified and deleted the unverified. Then I sorted the email addresses from A to Z and deleted all the obvious bots. There were 100 unverified addresses. By the time I deleted all the bots, there were only 28 addresses left.
So far I have not found a way to bulk delete on Feedburner, nor how to delete all emails and import just the 28 good ones. I may have to wait until July and have Feedburner do it for me. But I will keep looking.
The bots explain the five peaks of hits over 10,000, and almost 20,000 in 2017. If any of my blogger readers follow up on their own blogs, let me know the results. I am always curious.
Very informative, thanks! I think I'm just going to delete that gadget and be done with it.
ReplyDeleteBetter warn your friends first as some may depend on it to see your blog
DeleteThank you. When time is on my side I will certainly have a look. And yes I too deleted that email when I first saw it.
ReplyDeleteIf your comment section is any indication of your follower numbers, you should have a fair number of real addresses on that list.
DeleteI don't know how many 'real' people follow me by email. It will be interesting to see.
DeleteI have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
DeleteHave a nice day anyway
the Ol'Buzzard
I laughed out loud. You are a lucky man.
DeleteA useful overview of Feedburner alternatives is https://feedburner-alternatives.com. It might help you figure out the next steps.
ReplyDeleteYou are very helpful. Thank you , Unknown friend.
DeleteGood Lord, they sure made that complicated. That's why I never subscribe to blogs using their subscribe buttons. Instead, I use an RSS aggregator called Feedly, and I add the RSS feed from each blog. Then I can read everyone's latest posts in one convenient place, sorted into folders. Much easier for me!
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what an RSS feed is and looking up the definition didn't help. I can do simple step by step stuff usually.
DeleteI only had 52 subscribers and zero email subscriptions, so it seems to me that the bots have somehow found you but not me. Why this might be, I have no idea. All I can imagine is that, perhaps, Blogspot does a good job of stopping bots.
ReplyDeleteI moderate comments solely for the purpose of stopping bots and others who want to use my blog to sell things. Lately, I've gotten two pieces of spam to the same post, a post that I wrote a year and a half ago. Again, I have no idea why that post was chosen.
I have about 42 followers listed. A few have dropped off my email subscribers and really only about 4 of them are active.
ReplyDeleteI have been getting spam on a weekly basis from a couple of sources that have the same content all to the same blog post. I just go to the Comments Section of the dashboard and delete them. Not worth the effort of tracking and blocking.