+1 for sending newsletters to Feedbin. It’s a great feature.
The only issue I had once was a newsletter provider who required you to reply to an email to confirm you wanted to subscribe (which of course you can’t do as it’s only for incoming emails), but I contacted the newsletter owner and was approved manually.
HOLY CRAP I have been wanting this exact feature for years. I always thought why aren't Newsletter and RSS reside in the same space. I rarely use email anymore given all the spam and advert.
Probably multiple forces affect sending newsletters to email inbox:
- Client-side motivation : some users want to use their email as the "universal inbox". E.g. They may also send TODOs/reminders by sending emails to themselves instead of a separate app for alarms. Newsletters are just another stream of info that should conveniently go into their universal inbox.
- Publisher-side motivation: email addresses are valuable because it's important to "build an audience" outside of centralized platforms like Patreon/Youtube/TikTok. RSS doesn't solve the same problem because that's a "pull" mechanism instead of "push" like email.
If the above factors are unimportant to a particular person, then yes, the email inbox is a suboptimal communications channel for newsletters.
The absolutely most important reason: everyone has an email address. It’s not just the least common denominator, it’s pretty much the only common denominator. RSS practically does not exist outside the tech scene.
The main paradigm in RSS, also, is to make it look like e-mail.
Every feed reading mechanism I've ever tried that was usable looked like a mail client. Feeds look like mail folders, and arriving items look like mail delivery, with UI notifications like "Foo (15)" indicating that feed Foo has 15 unread items.
The advantage over e-mail is that it is pull; you don't have an RSS identity that can be spammed. Kill a feed and it is gone.
Everyone having an email address is a false assumption, or a bad generalization. There are people among us without one, and owning a phone number instead.
I'm not sure along which lines the divide falls though. Younger? Less western? Less businessy? It's still possible that the people who would be interested in a newsletter are the same people who have email addresses.
> RSS doesn't solve the same problem because that's a "pull" mechanism instead of "push" like email.
I don't think that matters. Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list.
Email is not exactly push anymore, it stays on a server waiting for the user to go there look. Any of them can, and usually do, automatically pull data on a schedule and alert the user when there's something new. The biggest difference I can see is that you and the user do not have to deal with the spam-handling problems. If the newsletter is spam, that's a big win for the publisher, but if it's not, it's a loss.
>Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list.
I mentioned "RSS" under the bullet point of publisher motivations and RSS being "pull" matters from the publisher's perspective because they want the email addresses.
With RSS, the publisher's server logs can see users' ip addresses (when client RSS readers scan the URL) but not users' email address.
Consider a real-life example of a publisher's perspective to make this distinction clear and to understand economic limitations of RSS:
- (no newsletter RSS url) <-- newsletter has no RSS option
... and Tim Ferris will not allow a RSS url for the newsletter because building his email mailing list is the _purpose_ of his newsletter. He's willing to allow RSS readers to access the main blog but not the newsletter. This selective access is not inconsistent and it makes perfect sense if one understands the publishers' motivations.
Luckily for publishers like Tim Ferris, many users prefer their newsletters in their email inbox which aligns with publisher's preference to send them there.
(Yes to be pedantic, some hackers can fake out email newsletters by using Feedbin's email+RSS bridge mentioned in other comments but that's not relevant here because publishers don't care about the small minority doing that.)
Not OP but I use Inoreader for RSS. It has push notifications in the paid version, although I don't need them, I just open Inoreader when I'm in a newsletter-reading mood.
> Tell us more about your reasoning.
The reason email does not work for me is that my email inbox is overflowing with a variety of types of communication: business emails that require a quick reply, unsolicited sales pitches, notifications from several services, personal emails. I need to go through each email rapidly and either reply immediately, snooze it for later, create an action item in the my to-do list, give a quick read and archive or just straight out archive without reading.
There's no place in this for "take 40 minutes to leisurely read this long-form email". Also the volume of communications is way to big to go through all of them and mark them for later reading. I imagine I could create rules for all the newsletters and send them straight to some folder but then the experience is just lacking compared to a dedicated RSS reader.
OK. (on a side note this is "Inbox bundles" solved elegantly in Google Inbox RIP)
Anyway - I too have an overflowing inbox. I used to aim for Inbox zero but slipped and am living with it.
One discipline I do maintain though is that the Inbox should always be actionable. It's my todo list.
So - how do I handle non-actionable, non-urgent stuff?
1. If it will be urgent and actionable I snooze it.
2. If it's of interest but not urgent and has a web representation then I open a browser tab for later.
Newsletters nearly always fall into category 2. Unless I can just skim them for interesting links and archive them.
And a lot of the time I unsubscribe - as soon as I realise I don't really want to read it. I get most of my news from HN or various subreddits.
I think there's about 3 or 4 regular newsletters I tolerate. And I'm more tolerant of infrequent emails (new features for products I'm interested in etc)
Google Inbox was fantastic, I miss it. Still, not as good UX as Inoreader for reading newsletters.
Also, I find it healthy to keep things I *have* to process (email, to-do lists) separate from things that I scan for interesting stuff when I have a moment to spare (RSS, Twitter, HN, Instapaper).
> I think there's about 3 or 4 regular newsletters I tolerate.
Maybe you'd be willing to tolerate more if you kept them out of your inbox ;)
The problem with newsletters of all sorts is that they end up in some sort of someday (but probably not) category whether they're explicitly filtered or not. Sometimes they end up in a Gmail tab that I mostly glance at infrequently. If I explicitly filter, I mostly stop looking at the filtering filter. I admit I used to use RSS a lot but these days mostly expect to find plenty of stuff through Twitter, HN, etc.
I switched all my email newsletters to RSS newsletters with https://kill-the-newsletter.com and my life has gotten so much better.
I was inspired by the design of Hey email, whose designers reasoned that newsletters aren't really that important, they should just be something you scroll through and separate from other email which often needs a response.
I need everything to go to my inbox, including newsletters. It's the only place I'm guaranteed to look besides SMS and my calendar.
Then I just process them together with everything else -- take a quick glance at headlines, archive if nothing interesting, keep it in my inbox if I want to read it sometime today, label it if it seems long and I want to keep it for later reading at leisure.
The last thing I want is yet another delivery mechanism I have to check.
If you have a problem with e-mail overload, it's not going to be solved by adding another information source. It's going to be solved by tackling it head-on in your e-mail, and there are lots of methods.
As others have said, I use an RSS reader for this sort of thing. Many newsletters provide a blog/syndicated version anyways which I can subscribe to, and there are bridges available. That being said, I don't have a bridge so for ones that are only available by email I setup filters and put them into folders unless I want to read them every single week (in which case I do think the inbox it the best place).
If you do decide to go the RSS route, I use https://www.inoreader.com and haven't found a better web-based/has a phone app one yet. The others I tried were all full of nonsense AI that kept bugging me, or weird javascripty fancy UIs that broke, or just didn't let me read inline (you had to click through to pages). Other recommendations welcome though.
My problem is not newsletters. I happily send those to a Newsletters folder via a filter.
My problem is companies sending important non-newsletter stuff in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from a filter point of view to their newsletter emails.
I'm a selfhosting nerd so I use Huginn to scrape the newsletters from my email and turn them into RSS feeds that I consume by converting them into an e-newspaper with Calibre.
I also use ttrss's feature to republish articles via an RSS feed, plus Wallabag and it's RSS, to get bundles of long form content onto my Kindle.
My Saturday morning ritual is then to open Calibre and download the last week's worth of Matt Levine newsletters to my Kindle, which I then enjoy on my porch with a coffee.
OK, but suppose someone were to scrape newsletters from their e-mail and turn them into RSS feeds, just like you do. But then, suppose they just behave like a typical RSS user and read these with a feed reader. A stereotypical RSS feed reader which implements an inbox-like paradigm, where you see feeds as folders, which show a count like (3) of new unread items.
What would be the point?
(What you're doing makes sense to you because of the additional steps that are enabled, like conversion into e-newspaper and whatnot. In principle, at least, a mail client could do the same thing, without requiring round trip out to RSS.)
First, at least IMO, RSS readers tend to have far better reading UX since their primary function is consumption.
Second, related to the previous, I prefer the "infinite scroll of content" UX of an RSS reader versus the typical email paradigm.
Third, it segregates the content so that my email contains those things that actually require effort to respond to, and not just content I'm consuming.
Fourth, you can blend your newsletters with other content published via RSS, creating a unified content feed of things you want to read (in my case it's a combination of newsletters, long form news articles, blog posts, etc).
Finally, again, RSS is far more convenient for converting to other formats like ePub.
Can you get some of these benefits with the right kind of email client, filters and config, etc? Probably. But, the original post was from someone saying they didn't want to use email. So this is an alternative. If you're happy using email, keep on keeping on!
I do something very similar. I've got mx records for a domain I own pointed AWS SES which invokes a lambda function that pushes the email to my Remarkable 2 e-ink reader.
What I'm doing is not for the feint of heart. For me it's as much for the joy of the project, though I do really like the power and customizability of the stack I've put together. I'm also a privacy wonk and I like having full control over my data, not to mention the content I'm consuming.
But yeah, I won't claim this is for everyone. But for those interested in a DIY project it's working great for me!
No, I prefer my newsletters to my inbox over anywhere else. I have an inbox zero workflow, so if I don't have time for in-depth item right away, I print it or save a PDF to my iPad reading list for later review.
I'm on the other side of the issue. I have 10000 subscribers with a 0.6% Spam rate. That's technically high, despite me getting all emails voluntarily and not even offering a freebie for signing up.
Anyway, can't use Facebook/IG/Reddit/Twitter because of the algorithm.
Can't email more than 4 times a year due to spam filters. I still pay hundreds of dollars a year to reach people via email octopus and Amazon.... And it still goes to Gmail spam.
If you are bombarded with emails, you either unsubscribe or you let them keep coming. Even if lots of people mark as spam, the number of emails not marked as spam greatly outnumber the spam emails.
It seems you can either email occasionally or email weekly. The current system is not set up for monthly emails.
My content takes weeks to produce.
I'm also a bit skeptical that Gmail treats all domains equal. I imagine HBO/Joann Fabrics/etc... has a deal to spam people, where I do not.
I get emails through to my GSuite inbox from senders that I've marked as spam repeatedly (10+ times). Same from email. Same subject style and format. And they still get through. Makes me really curious about what they're doing to get through.
90% of the spam that escapes my spam folder is web design pitches from email addresses of the format firstnamelastname123@gmail.com - always GMail...
If you're sending just 4 times a year, people will have forgotten you when you send them a message. That could be at the core of your problem: You send so rarely that people don't even remember signing up for your email list. You've got to build and maintain a strong relationship with your subscribers. Always provide value when emailing. Stick to your promise (the reason they signed up) when emailing. Email often enough that they won't forget you. Once a month, at a minimum, and 2-3 times in the first week after they subscribe.
Regardless of whether I "consented" or not, I'll mark recurring marketing/news/feedback emails as spam in Gmail. This also gives me the option to unsubscribe if Gmail finds a link. Much easier than seeking out the unsub link myself, so I use this even if it's not technically spam.
I do wish Google provided a standalone unsubscribe link. Or maybe companies shouldn't hide it in the fine print and make me fill out a form and survey. The bad apples ruin the bunch.
I had trouble with this back then. I used a home-baked email sender, emails looked good in mail tester and several mail clients, and yet, some of my test gmail addresses got the email in the Inbox, and some of them in Spam. I have no idea what was different.
Not at all. Any other medium would be a blog with RSS.
I set my email up to automatically snooze all newsletters to 8am the next day. Every morning I have a bundle. I read most of it, skip some, and then I'm done for the day.
The signal to noise ratio is pretty good, and more importantly its finite. I honestly can't imagine going back to scrolling newsfeeds or refreshing sites throughout the day.
I don't mind, although I don't get a lot of email. Maybe like 10 a day, and most of that is just receipts/invoices/confirmations which can be immediately archived.
So in fact my inbox is usually about 90% newsletters that I haven't read yet.
So - you don't use email for communication with actual people?
Do you mind me asking roughly how old you are? I would like to test my theory that email is generational and it's only the over-(insert number here) that still use it as it was originally intended.
> So - you don't use email for communication with actual people?
Nope! I may be cheating somewhat as I'm not counting work communication here, which does involve a decent amount of email, but I only access that inbox through a web browser so I can easily close the tab and be done for the day. I'm also not getting any newsletters to my work inbox.
> Do you mind me asking roughly how old you are? I would like to test my theory that email is generational and it's only the over-(insert number here) that still use it as it was originally intended
I'm 28. All my communication is via messaging apps (iMessage for family as we all have iPhones; WhatsApp for almost everyone else), so I suspect your theory is probably right!
I find the problem with messaging services is that there's no central inbox and no decent handling of "unread".
If I get an instant message from someone that I can't (or choose not to) respond to immediately, then the chances are very high that I'll forget to respond.
But with email it stays in my inbox and I can easily set it back to "unread" for extra emphasis.
I find I'm terrible at keeping up with messaging unless it's synchronous chatting. Anything asynchronous goes out the window.
I suppose I just find everything else lacking in features that I've come to depend on in email. I just don't understand how everyone else manages.
So I think for me things typically fall into two buckets. Almost all my one-to-one communication is with family members that will just call me if I miss a message they need an answer to.
The rest (and indeed the vast majority) of my communication is via group chats, which I personally find messaging apps to handle much better than email clients. It also doesn’t really matter if you miss something, as there’s generally enough messages going back and forth that you will see something else and then remember to go back and check the thing you missed (if you even need to).
I will concede though, finding a particular instant message is a damned nightmare compared to finding an email.
I am not the author of the comment, but I am 19 and only communication that I am doing through mail is related with support/feedback/employment. Also after I got a job as intern webdev (I don't even like it), we've been communicating via Slack. Also I saw that friends of mine have Discord/MS Teams/Telegram(!) as main communication service in companies.
So, I am also getting a few mails per day, and most of them are invoices, notifications that I don't need to see immediately, newsletters, etc.
FWIW, I'm 41 now and don't use my personal email for much p2p comms. Maybe a couple times a year there's a family thread about a gathering. My close friends is all SMS. My non-close friends is just another FB connection. I don't even have most of my friends email addresses. Actually one of my fairly close friends I met about 5-6 years ago just asked me for my email to forward me something logistics related. Most of my comms on over text as banter, check-ins or logistics. Mostly logistics since we meet in person most frequently and that's where we talk.
I get a lot more email though. I think it's more correlated with complexity of your life. Meaning, I started getting more email when I owned a home vs renting, then more again when I got married, then more again when I had a dog, then more again when I had a kid, I'm sure as my kid ages into more activities the email volume will increase further. Also, my "personal business" generates a fair amount of comms. Like hiring contractors, getting bids on things, basically anything I pay for that is not a retail purchase requires some email traffic. But people like my housekeeper, pool guy, and lawn guy I can text them for anything I need to have them look at. It's better that way since they don't work at a desk.
My inbox a good place for me to learn about the existence of a new issue of something, but a poor place to actually read said issues, to keep track of what I've read, and manage a 'library'. I want e-reader-like features:
- save my place
- highlighting
- annotations
Should these features be added to Gmail? I trow not. Better to have these newsletter issues converted to some appropriate format and sent to my library, along with my ebooks and saved web pages.
I find a lot of newsletters now are just blog posts that yes, would be better served elsewhere (especially those with little or no web archive/presence). A lot of great writing hidden away I feel.
However, curated newsletters with round-ups/link lists, I feel are great in email. I can tag them, stick them in a folder, and peruse at my leisure. However, if you're big on RSS this too may have limited appeal.
I just stopped reading email newsletter in general. Currently sitting at 307 emails unread in the newsletters folder.
I have a tab folder that I launch every morning when I drink my coffee and prep for the day. It contains HN, local news, tech news, several subreddits, and YC related stuff. I wish there was a digestible way to gather my top 20 so that I don't manually go through all that information while drinking my coffee in the morning.
> I wish there was a digestible way to gather my top 20 so that I don't manually go through all that information while drinking my coffee in the morning.
You know, it's likely most if not all of that can be fed into an RSS reader...
I found that the problem with newsletters is that there are too many too often. I discovered Mailbrew (https://mailbrew.com/) a while back and it solved this problem for me — together with “newsletterifying” a few of other content channels, like Twitter and HN.
I find that with most newsletters I don't really care about what's new or has changed. It's only when I actually need to use X product or do Y thing that I like to know what's new. This makes RSS nice since I can go weeks and then when I need to work on something using a tool I can check the news for that item.
It depends, of course. Some things I appreciate having it sent daily, others I really don't. There isn't a one size fits all solution and that's not a bad thing.
I kept missing my newsletters and that annoyed me to an extent where I decided to build my own solution: https://slickinbox.com/, Slick Inbox provides you an email that you can use to subscribe to newsletters, and the app is built for reading newsletters.
There are other services out there like Stoop Inbox, Feedly & Feedbin that also does the same thing, but point being that I think newsletters are fundamentally different from an "email" and thus deserve a special treatment (similar to how Podcasts are just RSS feed underneath, but it's fundamentally a different product)
Email is the optimal mechanism for any newsletter I care to receive. I get it with no effort (no need to go anywhere else) and it's there in my email reader for whenever I have the time for it.
I have a mail address specifically for news letters I subscribe to, so it's like a physical mailbox with my subscription magazines dropping in every now and then. If the newsletter is worth reading, I don't mind reading it in my inbox. The problem is that most newsletters are a waste of energy and then the inbox becomes a place where the newsletters go to die. Once I notice this pattern I unsubscribe from those newsletters. This leaves me with an inbox with mostly high quality newsletters.
I've found that most places offer the same content in an RSS feed as their newsletter.
I prefer the terminal newsboat RSS reader running in Docker. :
https://newsboat.org/https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat
...and lynx is also in the container for browsing.
My Gmail plugin is coming from the same pain (I subscribed to a ton of great newsletters, but they clutter everything human): https://www.getbreef.com . It's just my side project, and it's in beta - let me know if you'd like to try it.
It gives desktop Gmail an RSS-esque topic view of your inbox, and lets you infinite scroll through emails like you would Twitter or Insta.
One of the features I liked about Hey but as a broke graduate student couldn't justify that cost.
Easy to replicate in Gmail though: create a folder/label, filter to skip the inbox, mark as read, and go into the desired folder. Boom you have a newsfeed specific to your newsletters.
I use NetNewsWire (Mac, IOS) to subscribe to substacks RSS feeds. Free posts appear right in the app. You have to click through to read subscriber-only posts in the browser. It has several options for syncing your feeds' state between devices. (iCloud, Feedly, etc)
I actually like it. I'm in the habit of checking my email regularly, so this allows me to consume the content I subscribe to without needing to build a new habit/ritual. Not saying everyone has to do things my way, just saying why I like it.
I use an email address provided by Inoreader to get all my newsletters along my RSS feeds.
Unfortunately some newsletters are tied to my user account and my main email address for some services, so I had to do an email forward rule in Gmail for those for them to skip my inbox.
I set up a newsletters email folder with automatic filtering. When I feel like reading newsletters, I go there. Otherwise, I don’t see them. Sort of the same behavior loop of opening up my RSS feed (which, incidentally, is how I’m seeing this post).
It's clearly not just you, based on the other comments, but I use my RSS Reader (InoReader) for quicker bits of reading/scanning/art/comics, so email works just right for me.
I have filters for each newsletter, so I don't actually think of it much as "email," but as "let me go check and see which newsletters have new issues to read today now that I have time for newsletter reading." Checking just now, there are 18 individual titles under my "Lists" heading in Fastmail, of which six are bold, indicating something new to read.
For me, sending those newsletters to RSS would be a step backward, and having to remember to go visit the websites in question would be two steps backward, so I guess I'm the target market for the status quo!
Ill take a crowded inbox over the previous system: a crowded post box. At least i can throw spam blockers and other tools at the problem. Setting roadblocks to catch postal trucks is a federal offence.
Feedly has a newsletter feature that I use for a few of my subscriptions, but yeah generally I agree. Inbox/Email is for people reaching out to me directly, not for general Internet things.
I use Hey as my main email client and make good use of its feed category, a dedicated inbox for newsletters. I wish it would offer more "reader" options, but other than that it works.
I like email as news letter though. It is decentralize. I can read on any platform, anywhere, search going back. flag, move them around in my folder however i want
email newsletter are to me just a “blog posts with email notification”, they are difficult to filter, difficult to search and makes the inbox filled with less important stuff, i think there is a gap in the market for some sort of a solution, maybe a service that sends all your newsletters to “Notion” so you can search them ;) what do you think?
I recently switched to https://www.hey.com/ for email, which provides a dedicated page for reading newsletters.
I didn't like it at first, but after comparing in depth with Gmail and Superhuman I prefer the workflow. Having separate interfaces for communications, feeds, and automated emails has been great.