Readers and subscribers, you need to take action to continue receiving BioNews

To sum up what follows in a nutshell, if you wish to keep receiving the weekly BioNews email, then you must take action and click here - www.bionews.org.uk/subscription - to confirm your subscription.

Email is very important to us at BioNews. When our publication was originally launched in 1999 it was as a weekly email newsletter, and our website followed a few years later. The BioNews website has since become the hub of our activities, and we also have an active presence on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. But the weekly BioNews email remains a crucial focus of our work.

It is now seven years since our last major overhaul of the BioNews email and website. In that time much has changed, including the way mailing lists are managed.

Our present system struggles to cope with the task of sending our weekly emails to thousands of subscribers. We are aware that some of you have not been receiving our emails recently, and this is as frustrating for us as it is for you.

We are going to tackle this problem in two ways.

First, and most urgently, we want to make certain that every email address on our mailing list is valid. Please click here to confirm this - www.bionews.org.uk/subscription - or you will no longer receive BioNews by email.

(If you don't currently subscribe to the BioNews email but would like to, then you should still click here - www.bionews.org.uk/subscription - in order to subscribe. We recommend it!)

Alternatively, you can email my colleague Sandy Starr at sstarr@progress.org.uk to confirm that your email address is valid, and that you wish to continue receiving (or start receiving) the BioNews email.

Second, in the near future we will be moving to a new system for sending our emails - one that is better able to handle our requirements.

This will cost money, something which is always in short supply at our small charity. Any donation you can make to help us meet the cost of this move would be very much appreciated.

We are aware that because of the problems described above, there is a risk that some of our subscribers will not see this article. So if you have any friends or colleagues who are BioNews readers, please forward this article to them and make sure they see it, and please get them to email Sandy at sstarr@progress.org.uk to confirm their subscription.

Finally, if you've stumbled across this article on our website and are uncertain whether or not you subscribe to BioNews, simply click here - www.bionews.org.uk/subscription - and make sure!