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Zookoda, Help!!!

Posted by Paul B | April 1, 2008 .

I’ve been using Zookoda for a couple of years now in order to deliver RSS feeds straight to people’s email inboxes. It started of great but ever since they were taken over the whole service side of things seems to be going a little bit down the pan.

You’d probably ask at this point why i didn’t go with FeedBurner? There are a couple of reasons, first of all I didn’t even know that FeedBurner existed (it seemed to be a blogging community thing and I never really bothered with blogs up until about a year ago). Secondly it was and is a free service, until Google got involved with FeedBurner many of the features I needed I would have had to pay for.

The problem is that now Zookoda have really messed up for me, a client was using their service (on my recommendation) to keep potential customers up to date with their development news. They’d built quite a subscriber list over the last 18 months. Then all of a sudden at the beginning of this year the mail shots stopped working. On further investigation it turns out that Zookoda are no longer happy with “something” in the feed. I’ve ran it through every RSS validation tool I can find and there is nothing wrong with it. I even tried manually removing some of the later entries, again still no joy. In the end I contacted support, I wasn’t very hopeful, I guess I was right to be this way! I eventually got an e-mail back saying that they were having some “technical problems” with some feeds and that was that. Almost 3 months later and there are still no e-mail updates going out, push has come to shove and now it’s time to look for another provider.

What I really need some help with is finding that provider, the web is a big place! So if anybody knows of a free RSS to E-mail newsletter service that will allow you to manually add existing e-mail contacts (I’d really like some form of opt-in as well, rather than just allowing addresses to be added willy nilly) then can you let me know about it? The e-mails don’t have to be anything too fancy, either plain text or a simple HTML template would be fine, it’s only text content taken directly from the RSS feed. If FeedBurner would let me add e-mail addresses manually (and then prompt the address holder to opt-in) it would be great, as it is I don’t it has that functionality so does anybody have any ideas?

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  1. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.13  April 8, 2008 8:12 am

    It’s the squeeky wheel that gets the oil, my feed is now fixed. Thank you to the guys at Zookoda :)