Alas, Spam filters get in the way of mailings

Dear reader,

I have been having immense difficulties with my ‘poetry letters.’   They seem, in this ever-increasingly web-ruled world, to often get caught in Spam filters.  Those filters get ever more sophisticated as we get more and more emails about Viagra, about Chinese Pay-Pal, about Walmart sales.  Unfortunately, some of these email filters catch my poetry emails…

I have spent several months seeing if there is a way around these spam filters so I can send the letters and you can receive them. Alas, nothing seems to work.

Meanwhile, I had four letters written and ready to send – one on the Greek poet Simonides, one on  a ‘war’ composition by the French composer Maurice Ravel, one on Robert Lowell’s revelatory poem “Epilogue,” and one on two of Sappho’s poems.  I figured once I had the difficulties with spam filters worked out, I would send them, one per week, to you.

 Alas, alas.  Many recipients  of my most recent mailing, on Simonides, had emails that went either to ‘Junk Email’ or ‘Spam.’

 So here is what you can do.  If you did not get the emails I sent out, check your Junk Email and Spam folders.  If you find my recent emails there – on Simonides, and Ravel – either (best) click on the email and holding down the ‘select’ or mouse button and  transfer it to your inbox, or (more web links will appear written out in the text) forward each of those emails to yourself.  You’ll have the letter, then, in your inbox.

Read these two letters, on Simonides and Ravel, at your leisure.  The letters on Lowell and Sappho wilI come in the next couple of weeks,. I had meant to send them out weeks apart; then when there were difficulties and my drafts stacked up, a week apart.  Now you get to access two of them at once, and hopefully this letter will alert you to their existence.   So: At your leisure.  The other two I will mail in the next two weeks.

I will try, in the future, NOT to send photographs or images of the poets, and not to have web links in the emails.  Maybe that way they will avoid the Spam filters….

 I am so sorry this has been a difficulty for some of you.  You have no idea how much I worried, and tried work-arounds, to deal with this. 

Best,

Huck