Finding Email Addresses of WordPress.com Subscribers to Blog

  • Unknown's avatar
    neildgordon · Member ·

    I maintain a list of all the email addresses of members of our society.
    Many of those also subscribe to our blog.

    From time to time, I would like to email only the society members who have not subscribed to our blog, to make sure they are aware of information that was posted recently.

    I can download from the blog statistics area a csv file of all the Email-only followers of our blog, and then remove those that match from the full list of member emails, since I don’t want to bother those that already know.

    However, any member who has a wordpress.com account, and tries to use their email address to subscribe to the blog, ends up automatically subscribed as a wordpress.com follower, and not an email follower. It seems they have no choice. Then they get added to the list of WordPress.com followers, not the list of Email-only followers. But now I have no idea what their email addresses are, and how to find them.

    Is there some way of finding out their email address, so I can remove them from the list of the non-blog-followers, and make sure they don’t get bothered with extra emails when they have already seen the blog posts?

    Hope that makes sense – and hope you are able to help. Thanks.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    jackiedana · Member ·

    Your request does make sense. However, in order to provide you with a list of WordPress.com followers’ email addresses would be to reveal the email addresses on our users’ accounts, and we do not do that for both privacy and security reasons.

    What you might try instead is creating a separate mailing list such as the ones through MailChimp or Constant Contact, and ask members to sign up there for organizational updates. That has the added benefit of automating the process and allowing people to remove themselves.

  • Unknown's avatar
    neildgordon · Member ·

    Thanks Jackie.

    While I kind of understand that revealing the email addresses of the user accounts could violate privacy, they were already providing them when they put their email address in the form to subscribe to receive email updates. And then (as I understand it) the WordPress.com system forces them to subscribe as WordPress.com subscribers, rather than via those email addresses which were associated with their WordPress.com account.

    Would it be possible for existing WordPress.com subscribers to the blog to “convert” to being email followers instead, as an option as part of managing their subscription?

    Thanks for the suggestion of using a system such as MailChimp, but that would only further complicate the situation.

  • Unknown's avatar
    raincoaster · Member ·

    They provided the email addresses to WordPress.com, not to you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    It’s important for bloggers to recognize that when an email address is provided for a specific purpose, such as for receiving posts from a blog or for submitting a comment to a blog, that is the only purpose it is being provided for, and any additional use of it is unauthorized. In some countries, for example, Canada, it’s illegal to use an email address for any purpose other than the specific purpose it is provided for. … http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2013/10/31/wordpress-com-email-lists-newsletters-and-privacy/

  • Unknown's avatar
    auxclass · Member ·

    An existing account has two ways to subscribe to a blog here, either as RSS in the Reader or as an Email, I have some in the Reader and some email – subscribers do have an option

  • Unknown's avatar
    neildgordon · Member ·

    Thanks everyone for the feedback. Much appreciated. I do understand and support the need for privacy. I also realise there is an RSS feed option, but many of our members don’t use that method. Email is more straightforward.

    I just tried an experiment to check what happens.

    I used a completely new gmail email address to set up a completely new WordPress.com account, using a different web browser where I was not signed in to WordPress.

    I then went to my psnz blog, and entered that new email address to subscribe to receive updates. I did not ask to subscribe as WordPress.com. But the result was that I am now signed up as a WordPress.com blog follower from that new account, not an email follower.

    So it does seem to me that if you use the email address associated with your WordPress.com account then you have no choice but to become a WordPress.com follower rather than an email follower, and that email address is then (understandably) private. Whereas if you use an email address not associated with a WordPress.com account, then that email is made available to the blog owner.

    I’ll need to figure out some other workaround for my issue …

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