Thanks to the readers of the e-mail newsletter who let me know something strange was going on with the links embedded in it. Specifically, some or maybe all of those links were generating a message alerting readers that some nefarious person or thing might have hijacked the e-mail address or this site or whatever it said, for the purpose of sending out spam or doing other things that nefarious people and things do.
I do not think anything like that happened. What I do think happened will be related in the next two paragraphs, which I am telling you in advance because those paragraphs will be boring except to nerds. If you would like to avoid that, skip ahead two paragraphs and we’ll talk again there.
The problem involved a conflict between my RSS feed provider, FeedBlitz, and my e-mail newsletter service, MailChimp. (Look, I warned you about this just a second ago. You should probably be at paragraph five.) Back in the day, I used FeedBurner for my RSS feed, but then Google “deprecated” it, like it eventually deprecates most of its services that turn out to be useful. Or at least it threatened to do so—FeedBurner still exists so this may all have been unnecessary—so I switched to FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz also offers e-mail newsletter services, but I did not subscribe to those services. I wanted to use MailChimp instead. But the e-mail newsletter MailChimp sends out is generated from the RSS feed, which as I just told you was being supplied by FeedBlitz. At this point you probably have enough information to solve the mystery.
It isn’t impossible, I suppose, that some sort of nefarious hijackery was going on, but I have no evidence of that. So I suspect that FeedBlitz does not like it when its RSS-feed users traitorously sign up for a competitor’s e-mail service, and it has chosen to deal with this not by, say, lowering its prices or offering a better service, but by sending out semi-scary messages to readers alluding to a possible hijacking—without asking the original sender (me) whether that is okay. The motive, I assume, would be to get the RSS-feed user to sign up for FeedBlitz’s email service. The alternative, in this hypothetical scenario, would be for the RSS-feed user to disconnect from FeedBlitz entirely. And that’s what I did here.
The upshot (and welcome back, readers from paragraph two, you chose wisely) is that I’ve changed service providers and so, with any luck you will get no more odd messages if you click on a link in one of my e-mails. (Odd messages that don’t come from me, I mean.) Your e-mail subscription if any should not change. It’s just based now on an RSS feed generated by this site (https://www.loweringthebar.net/feed), the pure stuff, untainted by the nefarious or otherwise unwanted doings of any intermediate third party. But please let me know if there are any further problems.
If you are reading this on the website, and you don’t get the e-mail newsletter but would like to, the sign-up form is at the bottom of this page. Unless I have moved it somewhere else on that page, in which case it will be there.
As always, thank you for your attention to this matter.