This is just a quick and slightly tetchy admin post, for the benefit of (some) of those who subscribe to Nearly Legal posts by email. Anyone else can look away now…
I’ve had a few mails from people recently asking questions that made me realise that some clarifications may be in order. My apologies if this simply doesn’t apply to you.
1. The email updates are simply the content of any post that was added to the blog in the 24 hours before 6 am that morning. What the emails don’t include are the links to the archives, the comments that readers add to the posts, often with updates, further details or new lines of argument, or indeed the edits that are sometimes made to the posts as we find out more. For that, you have to visit the blog itself. It is just a click away…
2. I’m looking at a particular London area local authority here, but there is a general point. We do what we do on this blog for free, because we enjoy it. However sad this may make us, we are not sad enough to send you a precis of a case you want to know about because you email to ask us to.
You are very welcome to come to the blog’s website and use the search tools, the very ones that I have spent some considerable effort improving. That is what it is here for. If it is a housing related case from the last 2 to 3 years that you are looking for, a case note will very likely be in our archives. But, to be blunt, we are not going to dig the case you are looking for out for you and email you the results. At least not unless you provide us with an address to which to send the invoice ;-) Our rates for doing your searches for you are available on request, but we aren’t cheap.
3. If you have put in your email and clicked the ‘subscribe’ link but then haven’t received any emails from us – and we usually have fresh posts several times a week – there are three potential reasons why it has gone wrong:
i) you have put in the wrong email address (Typos etc. It happens. Quite often);
ii) Your firm/organisation/email provider/email programme has filtered out the confirmation email as spam. This seems to happen quite a lot. It might have something to do with ‘Nearly Legal’ appearing in the address and subject. Either contact your IT department and get them to clear the name or domain ‘nearlylegal.co.uk’ (you may need to reassure them we are a genuine housing law related site) or check your spam folder. There is not a lot we can do about this from our end, but without the link in the confirmation email being clicked, you won’t get the updates;
iii) you ignored the confirmation email, in which case the solution is obvious.
That’s all. I apologise for any note of exasperation that may have crept in. And, just in case it needed making clear, if you subscribe, Nearly Legal will have your email address, but you have our commitment that it will not be intentionally passed by us to any third party, or used by us for any other purpose than NL email updates, or, once in a blue moon, a direct email from Nearly Legal to you. The service is provided by Google, but there is no term that we can see in their conditions that enables Google to make any use of or make public your email address beyond sending you the NL update emails.