[jasode]

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.

[Sharlin]

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.

[kazinator]

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.

[rhn_mk1]

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.

[Sharlin]

I used the word "everyone" rhetorically, of course. The point is, to a first (and second) approximation everybody uses email and nobody uses RSS.

[easrng]

If you have a phone number, you probably have an email through a SMS/MMS gateway.

[rhn_mk1]

That's interesting, I have never seen that. Is it customary or well known in your area?

[easrng]

I wouldn't call it well known but almost every carrier I've heard of has one. Check https://www.mfitzp.com/list-of-email-to-sms-gateways/. If your carrier is an MVNO then use one from the underlying provider.

[MrStonedOne]

mathematically its true though.

if 0.999... = 1, then 99.999...% also equals 100%

[marcosdumay]

> 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.

[jasode]

>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:

E.g. Tim Ferris has a blog website.

- https://tim.blog/ <-- main url

- https://tim.blog/feed/ <-- RSS url for the blog

- https://tim.blog/comments/feed/ <-- RSS url for blog comments

- https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/ <-- newsletter URL requires email signup

- (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.)