As you know I’ve been playing around with FeedBlitz - a free service to deliver this blog’s posts as a daily email digest. The way it works is that it grabs the RSS feed of the site and creates an automated summary of the day’s posts via email subscriptions.

This morning I discovered FeedBlitz also offers AutoResponders. If you’re not familiar with auto-responders, they are a series of emails sent in order to each subscriber as they sign up.

For example, you can create a series of emails to walk through a short Bible study. Each email is a lesson. However one person may sign up on a Monday and another may sign up on a Thursday. If these lessons were on a blog, the person joining on Thursday will feel four days behind. But not so with email auto-responders. This technology allows the Monday subscriber to get the series started on Monday while the Thursday subscriber will receive the same five emails on the same schedule, but starting on Thursday instead. They never feel behind.

I haven’t tried the service yet, but according to FeedBlitz it’s a breeze to set one up:

So all you really have to do is blog your series of emails; we take care of when to deliver them on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis.

Very clever. The most obvious application of this would be a Bible study series, follow-up series, or tutorial of a new service. What other applications can you think of? Have you used auto-responders before?