I guess I let it go a bit too long…

• Chris Liscio

So here's a not-at-all-funny story for you, unless you're really into schadenfreude, to which I'll say in advance: "you're welcome."

In 2008 I signed up for a service called Campaign Monitor, because email marketing was getting to be a real pain for me to manage—keeping track of unsubscribe requests, testing that emails would render in the customer's inbox, etc. As my company grew, I started to use the service a bit more. But I always felt skeezy about sending mass email, so I tried to do it very sparingly to announce larger product updates.

In the summer of 2014, I was convinced to try and run an almost-quarterly newsletter to keep in touch with my customers: share some tips and tricks, interviews with high-profile users, etc. It was really fun to put together, but it got difficult for me to maintain the quarterly cadence on my own. The longest gap was Spring 2017 to Fall 2020, and the last one I sent was equally long ago in Summer 2022.1

I was about to put together my Fall 2025 newsletter to announce the 4.6 update to Capo when I learned that Campaign Monitor decided in August 2024 to shut down my account and delete all my data due to inactivity.

But I WAS NEVER NOTIFIED THIS WOULD HAPPEN! The only thing I could find is that my weekly report emails—indicating how many people proactively signed up for newsletter updates—suddenly stopped at the end of July 2024.

That's right: a company that was built to sending email and keeping in contact with customers has decided that it doesn't make sense to notify users via email that an account might become inactive, and that data will be lost. According to the support person I spoke with, I learned that it was necessary for me to have logged in so that I could see such a notice that my account was about to be deactivated.2 I'm sorry; What?! By contrast, linode sends me multiple emails spaced a month apart to notify me of an upcoming migration/reboot.

So yeah, here we are 17 years after I opened my account with Campaign Monitor, and I no longer have access to the nearly 10,000 email addresses3 that I sent my last newsletter to. Poof, it's just gone! But that's okay, because according to their support department, I'm "welcome to open a new account" with them.

This really stings, but I can't get too mad about it. It's my own fault for getting distracted by starting grad school in 2022 instead of keeping up with my newsletter emails. But it's also my fault that I expected an email-sending company to have sent me an email to inform me that this would happen.

Anyway, now I need to go and kick off a project to re-build this email communication channel with my customers from the ground up. But I can't seem to log in to my AWS console to set up SES…4

In the meantime, all I can ask you to do is keep your eye on this blog, or https://capoapp.com to watch for the 4.6 update for the Mac tomorrow on October 10th. Unfortunately, you won't be getting an email to notify you when it goes live.5

  1. Between 2017 and 2020, I had been juggling a heavy workload split between helping RØDE to develop a product that never saw the light of day, engineering the ML training and inference pipeline for Capo's Chord Intelligence mkIV, and building the Structure and Chords song views that shipped in Capo 4. In Summer 2022 I started at the University of Waterloo, where I completed my MMath in Computer Science last year doing research to discover technology supports for musicians who learn by ear. ↩

  2. Their support representitive informed me that, "[…] Campaign Monitor accounts are set to a pending closure status after a prolonged period of inactivity. At this point, users who log in are presented with an option to keep their account active. If they do not select this, their account is closed some time after for inactivity. […] We cannot share the criteria that determines an account inactive or the time frame used within the closure process, nor will we notify users of the account in any way beyond the in-app notification mentioned above." (Emphasis mine.) ↩

  3. This is a small fraction of the total number of Capo users, according to my App Store statistics. More than half of this list was built up very slowly from e-mail addresses collected in the (currently broken) form on the newsletter page. ↩

  4. I wish I was kidding. ↩

  5. But if you really want one, you can send a support email and I'll ping you about the update. I can even add you to the new list, but you'll have to ask. ↩