Subscription Email Improvements

Over the past couple of months we’ve been working towards updating and enhancing our email subscription process; so we’re excited to introduce you to the features we’ve recently rolled out to the public, improved emails and subscription management. This post will cover our improved emails, you can read more about subscription management here.

Improved Emails

If you subscribe to FederalRegister.gov documents via email you probably noticed that our emails have a new look and feel. Some of the changes such as the new design are obvious but we’ve also spent some time improving the readability and making the content in the email easier to scan.

One such change involves the length of the summary that is included in an email. Many of our users choose to subscribe to a broad swath of documents, such as each days Table of Contents. For these users it’s important to them to be able to quickly scan through all of the documents contained in the email in order to identify those that are relevant to them. With this in mind, whenever a large number of documents match a particular subscription we’ve kept the summary included to a minimum – making it easier to scan through such emails.

On the other hand we also have many users that create very focused searches that they then subscribe to. Because large numbers of documents do not generally march such focused subscription we’ve included a much longer portion of each document’s summary in these emails allowing users to get a greater sense of what each document is about.

Another more obvious change to our emails is the inclusion of ‘highlights’. As we continually refine and adding features to FederalRegister.gov we identified a need for a simple unobtrusive way to share tips and hints on ways to make the most of these features. Emails now include brief snippets that point out various features and ways to make the most of FederalRegister.gov – check them out and let us know what you think.

We’re excited to make these updates available to you, and as we continually work to make FederalRegister.gov meet your needs, we welcome your feedback, suggestions and ideas. So please make use of the ‘Site Feedback’ tab on the side of every page on the site and let us know what’s on your mind.