HELP! WE NEED A TECH WIZARD & A NEW NEWSLETTER SERVICE

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Dear Readers,

We apologize for the bizarre appearance of our newsletter this week, and other recent layout glitches. Constant Contact, our newsletter provider, has gone through some disastrous "upgrades" and now their so-called Customer Service is both unreachable and inept. If you know how to correct the layout so we can resend, please call our editor at 619-698-7617 ASAP or email editor@eastcountymagazine.org.  

If you can recommend a reliable and easy-to-use, professional looking alternative, run by reasonable and reachable people, please tell us! We will gratefully switch and recommend any viable alternative to our many readers.

This week the newsletter came in too wide to read on many and maybe all screens.  It looked perfect in preview. We've tried everything in the online help section and nothing worked, and customer service is no longer available after hours.

We can no longer use any clip art images in Constant Contact because they come in as blanks on some computers, but not all.  They don't know why. The "fix" they suggested melted down my email problem and caused me hours on the phone with tech support for gmail which also seems to not believe in phone service or any other way to get help.

A few weeks ago they changed the way you load photos and update them each week. We didn't realize that clicking change no longer changes it just for the new issue, but on all back issues. So people who clicked open old issues found photos that no longer matched the stories.  It also renamed all the images in the photo library and we wound up with many duplicates, but there's no easy way to delete them except individually clicking open each to see what it really is. now the image library keeps filling up and we can't import new images.

In addition, some people say they aren't getting the newsletter but they are shown as active contacts. Repeated complaints about this to Constant Contact has led nowhere.

Today I spent hours on the phone holding just to get a tech support person, only to reach someone who was clueless, promised to get help, and never called back. Now they are closed for the weekend and I can't even correct the errors to resend.

If there is anyone out there who can help us troubleshoot the immediate issues, and better yet find a caring competent newsletter service we can use instead of the current provider, please let us know.  Any new provider must be willing to alllow us unlimited emailings per day in the event of emergencies for our wildfire and emergency alerts, an exception Constant Contact made for us. This is the sole redeeming factor we've found at their company.

 

 

 

 


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