ASJA PACIFIC NORTHWEST NEWSLETTER
For ASJA members in
Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon and Washington
May 2025
https://asjapnw.org
In This Issue
From the Prez, Writing for Exposure, M. Carolyn Miller, ASJA PNW President
Email Management, Bruce Miller
Member News and Announcements
Our May chapter meeting at 11 am:
M. Carolyn Miller is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Time: Wednesday, May 21, 2025
11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87898612924
Meeting ID: 878 9861 2924
This newsletter publishes the first day of each month and welcomes article submissions and photos. Please email the ASJA PNW Newsletter Editor, Maxine Cass, at maxinecass@gmail.com .
From the President
by M. Carolyn Miller
ASJA PNW Chapter President
Writing for Exposure
I recently completed a course Jane Friedman, author of The Business of Being a Writer, offered to her readers for free. I took the course mostly because, as an instructional designer, I was curious about how she would design it. (True to her style, each module was a text-heavy email, sans any graphics.)
This last module was about writing for exposure rather than money. Friedman shared the story of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for The Atlantic who went on to publish best-selling memoirs including his latest, The Message. Coates began his career with The Atlantic by writing for them for free. In one of his blogs, he explained why: It offered him, as a professional journalist, a bigger arena for his ideas and words.
Publishing the essay with Business Insider gave me a taste of that bigger arena, even though I grumbled about the low ROI. But Friedman reminded me that payoffs are not always monetary and if I can reframe some of my publishing efforts as marketing, the payoff can be big. The key, notes Friedman, is to be sure those markets where you write for exposure are strategically identified as ones where your ideal reader is who will go to your website, sign up for your email list and eventually, buy your content.
Given all this, writing for exposure is now part of my own original work’s content marketing plan. As part of that, I am relaunching a monthly newsletter. (You can see some examples and join my list here.)
Writing for exposure may not be for everyone but for those of us relaunching our careers in new markets, it just may be the boost we need.
M. Carolyn Miller, MA, spent her career designing narrative- and game-based learning. Today, she consults and writes about narrative in our lives and world, the inextricable link between the two, and the critical role of self-awareness in transforming both. www.cultureshape.com
Wizard Island nestles in Crater Lake, Crater Lake National Park, Oregon. © Maxine Cass
by Bruce Miller
Email Management
Too many emails? Is your email address getting passed around and added to email lists without your consent? Here are a few ideas on taking back some control.
Filters
Most email programs and services offer ways to filter emails so that you can separate emails by sender or topic. This is a useful and more immediate way of keeping the less important emails off to the side.
Filters can be used to auto-delete incoming emails. Filters, however, do not prevent an organization from selling or sharing your email address. Political campaigns are notorious for this.
Disposable Email Addresses
The most effective way to control incoming email addresses is to use different email addresses with different organizations. The benefit of a disposable email address is that you can delete it. Any incoming emails to that address never get delivered.
A disposable email address typically forwards the email to another email inbox. For instance, you can forward an email from 55dividends@disposableemail.com to yourrealaddress@gmail.com. If you unsubscribe your disposable email address and it is still getting passed around for spam you can delete the disposable email address. Any incoming email to the disposable address will hit a dead end and you will never see it.
The downside of a forwarding disposable email address is that you cannot send or reply using the disposable email address in the FROM field. For emails that are simply notifications – such as daily news briefs – a simple forwarding email address works well. There are options and exceptions to this explained below.
Disposable Email Services
Disposable email services exist. Some are free with limits, some are not, and some will allow you to send using the disposable address in the FROM field. Some of these services are
You can get longer lists of services similar to SimpleLogin.io by using an AI service. For example, if you go to Grok.com, put in this prompt: “list services similar to simplelogin.io”
Do It Yourself
Setting up your own disposable email system is possible. Here are two inexpensive ways to do this, but you must own or have control of a domain name (e.g., example.com) to do this.
1 Use a domain registrar. Most domain registrars allow you to create forwarding email addresses. Pick your domain and within the registrar’s features, set up the forwards. When the email is no longer needed, just delete it.
2 Host the domain with a hosting company. Most hosting is used for websites. However, many hosting companies will also include email hosting. Host the domain on one of these services and then set up your disposable emails through the hosting service’s control panel. There are several advantages to doing this yourself:
Owning and using your own domain helps you remember the domain and associated email addresses.
Many hosting services will allow an email address to be set up as a forwarding address AND simultaneously be used as an inbox. In this way you can have email sent to your mainemail@gmail.com AND have the emails stored on the hosting service. This in turn allows you to log into the hosting service webmail to send emails from the disposable address. When done with the email address, remove the forwarding and remove the email account (for the inbox).
Using a hosting service can actually be cheaper than using a service dedicated to email forwarding. For example, SimpleLogin charges $36 US per year. However, an email address can only be used for forwarding or for an inbox. You can buy a cheap domain ($11 or less per year) and host it on a service for as little as $20 per year. So, for less, you can have unlimited email addresses, unlimited email inboxes, and simultaneous forwarding and inbox.
Seattle resident Bruce Miller uses a variety of Gmail accounts, a paid Yahoo account, and hosting services for email management. He uses different email addresses (on a domain he owns) with financial institutions, in part for protection and to be able to move money. around between institutions quickly using Zelle, which requires a unique email address for each bank.
Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel (Callospermophilus lateralis), Lava Cast Forest, Central Oregon. © Maxine Cass
Member News and Announcements
Joanna Nesbit (joannanesbit@comcast.net) is seeking ideas and contacts for future ASJA PNW meeting speakers.
NEWSLETTER PRODUCED BY
EDITOR: Maxine Cass
PROOFREADER: Catherine Kolonko
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE: Bruce Miller
*All stories are copyright by their respective writers.
*All photographs and illustrations are copyright by their creative makers.
*All rights are reserved to each of them for their own material.