Newsletters can be tricky. As a rule, people avoid subscribing to a mailing list because it eats up their time, and they don’t know how frequently you will email them. A second but equally big concern is that you will share their addresses with spammers.

Correspondingly, starting a newsletter is a potential minefield. Which addresses should you use? Are you allowed to contact people who have contacted you first? Or should you make people jump through hoops to prove that they wish to enroll to your newsletter?

How can one get around these problems? For me, the best answers has proved to be a two-step process. First of all, I decided that I do have a right to contact people who have already contacted me, but will never email people first: I only email people who have interacted with me in some way. Second, I am very careful as to what I send out. In effect, I use…