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by andybak 1817 days ago
How do I get notified of a new newsletter?

For me my Inbox is the only place I'm guaranteed to visit regularly. If a notification is on any other platform then I might not ever know about it.

But then - you haven't really explained what you mean. Do you mean in terms of rendering? notifications, sharing?

And it depends on your relationship to email vs other platforms. Tell us more about your reasoning.

1 comments

> How do I get notified of a new newsletter?

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.