subscription services
Unfortunately, MT's built-in subscription system is one of its weakest parts. I'm actually making use of a hacked version, which you can find out about in this MT support forum thread. The hacked version allows subscribers to unsubscribe themselves, and also notifies the webmaster when new subscribers are added. The fact that these functions had to be hacked in is one of the weaknesses of the script.
Fortunately, MTPro (forthcoming summer 2003 2004) promises to have a much-improved subscription service.
Two other major frustrations with the subscription service are that it doesn't format the HTML from your posts, the tags appear in the email, and the blog author has to manually send the notification email after posting. I know I've forgotten more than once to do it.
A non-MT alternative is Bloglet. It's very easy to set up your RSS feed at Bloglet and much more reliable than Bloglet remotely accessing your blog (its standard functionality) as well as being more secure.
The drawback to Bloglet is that it only sends out one email a day. For me on the West coast, it usually takes all posts before about 8:30 p.m. Since I often post in the evening, it could be more than 24 hours before Bloglet subscribers read my posts.
Conclusion: there's no perfect solution at the current time. I offer both services for my visitors and I have a link to a discussion of the pros and cons of each service.
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