Belt and braces backups

Happy Saturday!

No lie in for me today. It’s been one of those days where every time I finished one thing, it led straight on to the next.

What if Cloudflare closed my account?

That was the question rattling around my head this afternoon. Newsletter Sender runs on Cloudflare, so what happens to your newsletter if the worst happens? The good news is your emails go out through your sending service, such as Amazon SES, so your sending and your reputation aren’t touched. Your subscribers and stats are another matter, so today they got proper looking after.

• Backups of any size. Backups are now made in parts, so even a big list with years of sending history is fine. For the curious, 100,000 subscribers comes to about 5 MB, and it’s the sending history that grows.
• Restore from a file. Download a backup, install the app on a new Cloudflare account, choose Restore from a file and you’re back up and running. I tested it and every row came back exactly as it was.
• A copy in your own Amazon account. If you send with Amazon SES, the app now copies each nightly backup to your own Amazon S3, off Cloudflare altogether. Copies are kept for 31 days and it costs pennies. I set mine up at 5pm and the first copy landed straight away.

If I thought about this, I’m sure others will too, so there’s a new backups guide, a page on exactly what the setup wizard creates in your Amazon account and two new answers in the Q&A.

It was a good day for testing too. Postmark, Resend, Brevo and Mailgun all passed, and the app now has its own Update button, so you can move to a new version with one click. Version 0.2.0 went out this morning.

Zoho Mail, in depth

After my chat with the Zoho team this week, I published an in depth review of Zoho Mail’s business plans. It goes well beyond the free plan, covering what you actually get for your money and who it suits best. If you sign up through my link, Zoho also gives you $100 of Zoho Wallet credit, which is a nice bonus.

Over to the hosted providers

I’ve covered quite a few self hosted mail servers lately, so next week it’s the turn of hosted providers, with Infomaniak, IONOS, iCloud Mail and Runbox all on the list.

I signed up for IONOS Mail Business this morning at 9:29. The page said my account would be ready in “a few more seconds”. My login emails arrived at 14:55, five and a half hours later. Then it decided my domain was being transferred to them, which I never asked for, and the only live chat is an AI bot, so I’ve raised a ticket. Seven hours in, still no mailbox. Let’s just say that review is going to be an interesting read.

Something brewing (a bit more)

Yesterday I teased a new project. It now has a name, Site Patrol, and a proper website with a page for every feature, a pricing page with a full feature table, plan by plan, and secure payments by Stripe. It keeps an eye on your websites so you hear about problems before your customers do. There’s a free forever plan, so do have a look. Apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac are next on the list.

Odds and ends

• I now have one admin for everything I run, with every site and mailing list in one place, plus what it’s all costing and each night’s backup. It even has a menu that folds away, as all good admin pages should.
• I finished moving everything off my old setup today, and the last of the old branding has gone from the member tools. It feels good to have one home for it all.
• ReaderCount now remembers which site you were last looking at, so you don’t have to pick it again every time. A small one, but it was annoying me!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

As always, sharing the love.

Stay safe