14 DAY TRIAL // Medium, the blogging platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has announced a new feature that will allow editors to send out stories directly to their reader's email inbox.
This new feature is called "Letters" and is available for all users who have created a "Publication" in their Medium account.
Once the blog post has been written and sent out via the Letters feature, it will be delivered to all users following your publication, both on Medium's website and its iOS app, and now also to the user's email inbox.
"Letters have the potential to provide what blogs used to through RSS subscriptions," says the official Medium announcement. However, we reserve the right to disagree: RSS was, is, and will forever be RSS! Letters are just plain ol' newsletters, or in some cases, spam.
Medium has been in general very attentive with its userbase, providing a way for them to export or delete blog posts, and allowing users to customize or deactivate accounts.
You should not be worried about any nefarious actions on Medium's part, this feature providing just an alternate method for dedicated users to follow their favorite authors.
Since emails are delivered instantly to their inbox, users can set up alerts on their phones or desktops, and read articles as soon as they come out, without having to hang out on Medium's website all day.
It's not spam if you can unsubscribe
By default, all publications will have users subscribed to letters by default. If, as a user, you find this very disturbing, there's a way to turn all these unsolicited emails off. To do so, you should follow the steps detailed below.
Step 1: Click on your avatar in the upper right side of the screen.
Step 2: Select the "Settings" option.
Step 3: Click the "Manage publication emails" in the "Publication email subscriptions" section.
Step 4: Go to the "Following" section and click "Unsubscribe from letters" next to each publication you're following.
