12 ms·

Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds

343 points by ProfDreamer 10y ago

tedmiston 10y ago
I'm so glad that someone built this. I have the same use case as the author where I just don't want newsletters to read, but that are time insensitive, intermingled with communication to people in my inbox. I'm excited to try this approach. I'd be interested to see what other solutions people have come up with to this problem.
- icebraining 10y ago
  A simple approach is to filter them in your email client into a folder/tag and out of the inbox. That's what I do for mailing lists (which aren't well suited for RSS, since they're threaded).
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    That's what I do today but what often happens is I just never check them. Also some newsletters contain events or occasional time sensitive bits so partial filter has proved a challenge there. Curious to hear if you've experienced either of these.
    - jclos 10y ago
      I used to also filter them out to a folder with no unread tag until I realized that I missed quite a few free ebooks that O'Reilly was offering. Since then I still have them in a folder but I go mark it read once a day to make sure I don't miss stuff like time-sensitive offers.
doozler 10y ago
This service looks really awesome! I think there may be a slight spelling mistake on the first line of the "Introduction" section. It say's "I love newsletters, but I have receiving e-mails", should that be "hate" ?
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi doozler, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for the kind words and for pointing out the mistake. I fixed it :)
thecabinet 10y ago
NewsBlur does something similar. Forward your newsletters and they appear as an RSS feed. Works with any kind of email...
- snksnk 10y ago
  This! NewsBlur is awesome. For newsletters: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/146752875548/newsletters-in-your-newsblur http://blog.newsblur.com/post/146752875548/newsletters-in-yo... NewsBlur even has support for Twitter: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/145256277160/twitters-back-baby http://blog.newsblur.com/post/145256277160/twitters-back-bab...
- Semiapies 10y ago
  Similarly, Feedbin gives you an email address you can aim a newsletter at and see as another feed. It's kinda genius.
  - leafac 10y ago
    Hi thecabinet, snksnk and Semiapies, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comments! I didn’t know of NewsBlur and Feedbin and it’s nice to see that other tools take similar approaches to the use case. It validates that my solution was appropriate. It’s unfortunate that NewsBlur and Feedbin bind the feature to their platform. But I guess it makes sense, Feedbin is even trying to make money. Anyway, whenever you need a free tool that doesn’t lock you in or ask for your personal information, I hope you consider Kill the Newsletter! an option :)
    - Semiapies 10y ago
      It validates that my solution was appropriate. It does! It’s unfortunate that NewsBlur and Feedbin bind the feature to their platform. But I guess it makes sense, Feedbin is even trying to make money. Unfortunately, this is nonsensical and obnoxious. I'm perfectly happy to pay for a service, given that "free" tends to mean "shuts down in a couple of years". And I'd have to pay for a server anyway if I wanted to run my own.
  - 10y ago
tomislav 10y ago
Just a heads up that almost all Mailchimp newsletters (and many others) have RSS feeds. Just put the archive link into your RSS reader and it will autodiscover it. But this is great for those that don't. Great work.
- justinator 10y ago
  Yup, Dada Mail too (example: http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive_rss/dada_announce/ http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive_rss...) but only for the last, I dunno, 12 or so years.
ommunist 10y ago
Well, you can't effectively kill newsletter. Because newsletter COMES so you, and you have to CLICK to get feed.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  It depends what level of abstraction you're working at. At the level of sockets, you're right that a mail server receives a connection from a sender when a newsletter is sent, whilst an RSS aggregator initiates connections to each feed's source when it polls, even if there are no new articles. At a lower level, the server's doing polling to check for new connections, but that's a fast local operation so it doesn't break the higher-level abstraction. I wouldn't say there's much difference from a user point of view, i.e. "clicking". Polling for feeds with an RSS reader is comparable to polling for new messages with a mail client. Both can be made fast by fetching mail and/or news in the background, either using a client or using an OS service.
  - detaro 10y ago
    And feeds also have a (close to) instant notification mechanism in the form of W3C PubSub aka pubshubhubbub.
  - ommunist 10y ago
    You are quite correct. But for vast majority of real world users RSS is quite misterious piece of technology. Emails are ok, everyone 'knows' what the email is? But 'feed'. Can I save it for offline use? Can I forward it to friends and family?
    - chriswarbo 10y ago
      > But for vast majority of real world users RSS is quite misterious piece of technology. I would imagine that the "vast majority of real world users" of this email-to-RSS converter know exactly what RSS is :)
      - ommunist 10y ago
akamaozu 10y ago
Out of curiosity, what's stopping me from using this to sign up for services and having this app mahically keeping their emails out of my inbox, but neatly filed away for when I need it?
- Tepix 10y ago
  That's the idea. You poll the RSS feeds whenever you want to see if there's anything new. I.e. probably not that frequently.
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi akamaozu, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you for your interest. Nothing technically prevents you from using the tool in the way you propose. But I ask you not to, if you can. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957555.
jypepin 10y ago
It's funny, last week I actually looked for the opposite! I don't use RSS and don't have a reader (since google dropped theirs) and so when I find blogs that interest me, I want to be able to subscribe via emails. Then I just add the updates I receive in the correct folder/tag and go back to read whatever I want, whenevr.
- douche 10y ago
  I do have an RSS reader, but it has become such a chore to keep up with it that I mostly don't bother. Picking the best content providers and getting a handful of emails a week from them is better than the cesspool of 6000 unread items that confronts me when I pull up RSS.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I tried this approach but found that I'd get an email newsletter with 5–10 stories but I might only want to read 1 or 2. I'd like to only keep the ones of interest. Opening them and adding to Instapaper or Safari Reading List seems to work okay.
bikamonki 10y ago
I think we are moving towards a descentralized Internet. The RSS feed needs a central server, the newsletter can be broadcasted and then forwarded peer to peer. I'd argue the opposite then: save the newsletter, just maybe evolve it into something better (maybe with schema email??)
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Sounds like Usenet :) RSS is probably easier to layer on top of those new fangled HTTP-over-P2P networks like IPFS. Heck, I remember proposals for combining RSS and BitTorrent, so an RSS feed could be spread via BitTorrent, with incremental updates being applied, and with each entry containing BitTorrent magnet links. This was proposed as a distributed way to provide podcasts ("podcatching"). Not sure if it got implemented.
  - pmlnr 10y ago
    Usenet is, unfortunately, ancient and arcane enough that a vast amount of the the current veteran dev people never ever heard of it. It's an awesome thing, even though it has it's capacity limits, and it really should be revived ( and not the way it is at the moment, as a torrent replacement ).
  - bikamonki 10y ago
    Yes of course, RSS over a distributed channel works as well!
  - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
    NNTP is one of the most underrated protocols. It's a distributed superset of email + RSS + twitter.
    - dantheta 10y ago
      There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me. I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)
iagooar 10y ago
Kudos for making the source code available and allowing to self-host the service. If you are thinking about making some money with it, maybe one twist would be to be to offer a SaaS "proxy" between the newsletter and the subscriber, where subscribers enter their real email and search for newsletters they are interested in and convert them into a feed? Although TBH I'm not sure there is money in RSS readers...
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Also a few tweaks - make the UI easier to use on mobile - make feed title and feed URL fields appear together at the same time - send a test post to each newly created feed so I can confirm it's working That said, I'm not sure if OP is actually the author based on taking a glance at commit dates in the repo.
  - leafac 10y ago
    Hi tedmiston, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you for your suggestions :) > - make the UI easier to use on mobile I don’t own a phone, can you please be more specific on the difficulties you had? I’d be happy to address them. > - make feed title and feed URL fields appear together at the same time To which screen are you referring? > - send a test post to each newly created feed so I can confirm it's working That’s a good idea. Of course, the sole fact that the feed exists with the title you gave is already confirmation that it’s working. Even if there are no entries. And, right after creating the feed on Kill the Newsletter! the user is probably going to use the email address the service gives to actually sign up to a newsletter. Upon doing that, the newsletter provider usually sends a subscription confirmation email that shows up as a feed entry. Still, I think one more confirmation wouldn’t hurt and I’ll add it. > That said, I'm not sure if OP is actually the author based on taking a glance at commit dates in the repo. You’re correct. I don’t even know ProfDreamer, but I’m glad he liked my work enough to post it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have received feedback such as yours :)
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi iagooar, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your idea, but my intent is not to make money with this. Let alone get a hold of users’ real email address :)
mike-cardwell 10y ago
I prefer to use my email clients to read my news. Means I don't have to run an additional application. I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I filter them into a "News" mail folder. I run K-9 Mail, Mutt and Webmail depending on what device I'm using. Thanks to IMAP my "news readers" stay in sync due to the "\Seen" IMAP flag, and the ability to delete messages. Thanks to IMAP PUSH I don't have to poll for new RSS items on my various client devices. Thanks to IMAPs subscribe I don't get News on devices I don't want it on. [edit] I use sieve to filter real newsletters into the same "News" folder, so it's a mixture of content from RSS feeds and newsletters.
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  > I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I totally keep meaning to do this. Glad I'm not the only one with this crazy preference!
  - rahimnathwani 10y ago
    https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- pa19 10y ago
  You can use http://blogtrottr.com/ http://blogtrottr.com/ to do this too
  - collinmanderson 10y ago
    I use Feedburner, though despite being Google, it doesn't support feeds that use https :(
- pmlnr 10y ago
  I first used rss2email[1], moved on to writing my own initially as a WP plugin (using the blogroll links to pull from); it gradually evolved into a standalone python thing to support mf2[2] feeds. I do prefer RSS entries as email entries, therefore newletters and RSS feeds are more or less the same to me. [1]: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ [2]: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed
shortformblog 10y ago
As a guy who runs a newsletter with a few thousand subscribers, I'm supportive of this idea. In fact, I put a lot of work into my RSS feeds knowing that people like this would exist. http://feed.tedium.co/ http://feed.tedium.co/ (Using FeedPress, if you're curious.) I see it less as killing the newsletter, and more as giving people options.
- criddell 10y ago
  I just checked out your site and uBlock blocked 27 requests and noted that loading the page involves 11 domains. Do you have any insight into what's being blocked and why so many domains are being accessed?
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Why don't you take a look at the uBlock log?
    - criddell 10y ago
      I never knew there was a log. So now that I look at it, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Judging by what's red, I think uBlock is mostly stopping the blog from tracking me. Also, the number of blocked requests is now 36. Not sure why it would keep climbing after the page is loaded.
      - tedmiston 10y ago
        Sometimes people defer loading of unnecessary JavaScript, like trackers, until after the page is "loaded", so that's why you might see the page appear to finish loading then more blocked requests appear in the seconds that follow.
  - jimktrains2 10y ago
    Do you do this to every site? Everything I see is stuff like Google Analytics and Share this. Check your logs before asking a question you can answer yourself. If you have a specific complaint, then contact the admin or owner.
uptown 10y ago
Pretty sure publishers prefer newsletters because they get opened more than an RSS feed based on a few conversations I've had.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  That's why this (or something like it) is a good solution. Publishers can still send emails, but users can decide they prefer to read them through RSS.
yesimahuman 10y ago
Interesting idea that could co-exist with newsletters, but as a business person newsletters are the best. Seriously, nothing compares to a good list. Not Twitter, not Facebook, not Ads. It's gold.
tammer 10y ago
Nothing currently wins over the format or ease of use of newsletters. This is why they're becoming MORE popular as an engagement tool. I think there's a vacant startup space for a tool that can beat newsletters for ease of both entry on the sender side and engagement by the recipients in the many-to-many communication mode.
finchisko 10y ago
I personally prefer RSS over mailed newsletters. And was expecting that newsletters will eventually die. I was wrong. Not sure why they didn't died and actually grow more popular, but IMHO RSS is probably too complicated for regular Joe, so they probably not even know RSS exists. I'm only subscribed to newsletter when RSS is not an option, like js weekly, android weekly... But wish I can read those in digg/reader too.
- vollmond 10y ago
  Yeah, I would assume newsletters have a lot higher chance to be read... everyone I know has an email account, but only a subset bother with RSS. And even if you have RSS, chances are you have a lot of feeds you never read that just end up part of the furniture of your life.
  - nf05papsjfVbc 10y ago
    Also, it's much easier to track the average person's actions when you send them an email vs when they have an RSS feed. So, all these websites that show a 'sign up for my newsletter' popup when you visit them, will not choose the RSS option. I hate tracking URLs, pixels etc. but I don't see how we can get them to not use them.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    Maybe RSS should rebrand as "textcasting" or something. Podcasts are popular, are not considered only for "power users", and are just RSS feeds of audio links.
- petercooper 10y ago
  Editor of JavaScript Weekly here - we do have RSS :) It's linked on the top of our site. We just don't put a lot of effort into it because e-mail is our top priority, but it's been there for a few years now. (Ditto for all our titles like Ruby Weekly, DB Weekly, WebOps Weekly, etc.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
bogomipz 10y ago
Tangential question here - can anyone comment on the recent-ish proliferation(explosion) of sites thats float an HTML 5 light box a few seconds after the page loads asking people to "Sign up now for our newsletter!" It's a pretty obnoxious practice. Newsletters aren't new of course but there seems to be a very enthusiastic renewed interest in them. Does anyone know why?
- revicon 10y ago
  Two reasons I've heard, but haven't tested out personally yet: 1) The pop up results in higher conversions (people actually filling out the email address field and hitting "subscribe") 2) The action of "closing" the modal popup confirms that the viewer of the page is probably a real human and that they genuinely made some kind of movement on the page (scrolling slightly, moving the mouse off the window, etc). This is supposedly taken into account by google, etc when judging page rank for pages.
  - bjterry 10y ago
    Regarding 2, Google has started penalizing these popups, at least for mobile users. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easi...
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    Thanks for the response. In regards to number 1 I would be very surprised for that to be true simply because these pages are asking people to sign up often before a user has had time to read the first couple of sentences in the opening paragraph. I guess this is the part that drives me nuts is that they don't give you time to read the content before asking so how would someone even make an informed decision before giving out their email address? Interesting about number 2. Is there still not an extension to block this HTML element?
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    For 2, a less annoying arrangement might be to make sure the most important content continues past the fold, forcing anyone reading to scroll.
loserkiddo1 10y ago
hola
sametmax 10y ago
I would love to kill the newsletter. I love RSS. I perceive most newsletters as spam. Except: - non tech saavy users don't know what RSS is and often won't use a RSS reader even after tutoring. - newsletter still makes a LOT of cash. I didn't believe it, but working in the adult industry teached me that many things I would never do (read a news letter, click a ridiculous add, engage with an obviously fake profile) is actually common practice among the vast majority of users.
- petercooper 10y ago
  I perceive most newsletters as spam. You primarily receive newsletters you didn't actually sign up for? (stores you bought stuff off, etc.) That's the only way it's spam. But there are plenty of people who actively sign up for and appreciate them.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    When every website uses black-design to "helpfully" sign you up for their newsletter without you noticing, it gets harder and harder to differentiate actual newsletters that I signed up for, vs plain old spam. When in doubt, mark-as-spam it is.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    I never sign up for newsletter, but I still receive plenty that I have to manually opt out.
olivierlacan 10y ago
While going back to RSS sounds like the virtuous move, the reason I believe most people are going back to newsletters is that email is an inbox people have to check and the likelihood of them viewing and acting on content that is delivered to their email inbox vs their RSS reader inbox is much higher. With no data to back this up I'd wager conversion rates (read x and click to see y linked within x) are at least double that of RSS. Possibly even much more. I've been an RSS user for years and I use it to subscribe to blogs mostly. Despite this, I would never subscribe to the RSS feeds of some of the most popular email newsletters I know and receive. With Google giving up on the Google Reader years ago, the market for well-designed, easily accessible, and free RSS readers sort of dried up overnight. I use Reeder for macOS, which is a paid (but cheap) app and I know full well this is a power user situation. I would never expect the overwhelming majority of users to get back on the RSS bandwagon unless browsers made it a first-class feature with a noticeable call-to-action on sites with available RSS feeds, an inbox letting me know new content has been published since I last checked, and a clean reading interface that mirrors what Readability, Instapaper, and others used to provide.
- dwightgunning 10y ago
  Exactly. The marketeers and Growth Hackers won the battle. That discussion around engagement was even had amongst RSS advocates when it came syndicating the full-text vs a summary (really,the lede) of a post/article. Anybody looking to monetise attention should be focussed on email.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  > an inbox letting me know new content has been published since I last checked I'm super happy with RSS and don't want to clutter my inbox. One difference with e-mail is that sometimes we don't care about some articles, especially on the high volume sites. In an RSS reader it will be bold as unread and this cause anxiety and make it harder to distinguish a newly arrived article vs the most recent unread article. I feel that for RSS we need three levels of flags: new, unread, read. Or "unread, read title, read article". In an e-mail inbox you will make sure everything is in the read status. In an RSS reader that amounts to too many janitor clicks.
- 10y ago
gilgongo 10y ago
RSS was all the rage back in about 2005. About time we tried again after failing to get it to work first time.
- Leynos 10y ago
  For some people, it never went away.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ourcat 10y ago
This appears to create Atom feeds, not RSS.
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi ourcat, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comment. Indeed, the tool generates Atom feeds instead of RSS. It is a better format. But RSS is a more popular term, so I went it. It’s like the TLS vs. SSL: I only use the term TLS with highly technical audience.
sincostan 10y ago
I've used emails2rss for a few years for mailing lists. Exists as a google app.
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi sincostan, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comment. I tried the tool you mentioned before creating Kill the Newsletter! Of course, I was trying same work :) Unfortunately, I ruled it out for two reasons. First, it required a Google account, thus binding my identity with my reading preferences. Second, I set up a throwaway Google account just to test the service and it didn’t work. I can’t remember exactly why, though. It was definetly an inspiration for Kill the Newsletter! It gave me an indication that the project was feasible.
norswap 10y ago
Very useful! What worries me: when this eventually fails, I won't know it's not working anymore (partially the fault of my feedreader, but still).
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi norswap, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. That is a valid concern, thanks for bringing it up. I worry about this myself, being the #1 user of the tool. Do you have any idea how to fix it, though? I thought of a dead man’s switch kind of thing, in which I would periodically add an “everything is still working” for low-volume feeds, but I didn’t do it because I would consider such entries spam. What do you think?
  - norswap 10y ago
    I don't really have a better suggestion. Ideally, making sure that the feeds would raise some kind of error condition in all feed readers, but I doubt there's something universal like that. Maybe the "still working" message is good enough, it wouldn't bother me too much, personally.
Ayraa 10y ago
I just created a separate email address to receive all the newsletters I enjoy reading but don't want to mix with my work/personal emails. I check it 1-2 times a week. Works beautifully.
necessity 10y ago
I gave up looking for such service a while ago, instead I just used twit2rss or the like (everyone with a newsletter is also on twitter it seems) and emailed the website suggesting an RSS feed in the future. Good to know it exists now.
allyjweir 10y ago
Great job on the project! I had this exact same idea about a week ago and put it on my Trello. Will definitely be taking a deep dive into your website for inspiration. Congratulations on shipping!
sengork 10y ago
For those who used to use Google Reader I can recommend www.netvibes.com
WillPostForFood 10y ago
Maybe we need to star with: Revive the RSS readers! Then move to killing the newsletters.
zizee 10y ago
I run a curated newsletter builder platform^, that includes subscription/delivery component. After reading this, I'm going to survey my users (email publishers) to see if enabling RSS subscription is something they are interested in... ^https://www.NewsMaker.io https://www.NewsMaker.io
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi zizee, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. I’m glad to know that my project inspired your idea. Feel free to generate NewsMaker RSS feeds using Kill the Newsletter!, if you’d like :)
bbcbasic 10y ago
Doubles up as a way to get an anonymous / throwaway email address. I just signed up a twitter account using it :-)
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi bbcbasic, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you for interest, I’m glad the tool was useful to you. While of course Kill the Newsletter! does work as a throwaway email address, I ask you to please not use it for that. I fear this might result in @kill-the-newsletter.com email addresses ending up in blacklists. Or that the service grows in a way that I couldn’t support with my $0 budget :) Finally, I can’t make strong guarantees of privacy and security for incoming emails. The security is through obscurity of the generated email address and corresponding feed URL, which is not a strong model. This is generally fine for newsletters—whose contents are public anyway—but not so much for signing up for a private Twitter account. Also, there are other tools like https://www.mailinator.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/ designed specifically for this use case. You’re much better off with them! And, when you want to convert that newsletter into an RSS feed, I hope you consider Kill the Newsletter! an option :)
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Hi leafac, thanks for the response. I don't plan to use your service that way myself but thought I'd mention it so you are aware. I think its a great service for the original purpose though and I'll start using it for that.
leafac 10y ago
Hi all, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you ProfDreamer for finding my service and posting it here. Thanks too to everyone that took interest in Kill the Newsletter! and commented or wrote me emails. I appreciate the kind words and testimonials that the tool was useful to some of you. I also appreciate the suggestions for improvements, I’ll try to implement them in the near future. Kill the Newsletter! ended up on an LifeHacker article: https://lifehacker.com/kill-the-newsletter-converts-newsletter-subscriptions-i-1788953342 https://lifehacker.com/kill-the-newsletter-converts-newslett... As a long-time reader of the website, I’m flattered. Finally, I want to say a word about the name of the service. The copy on the website starts with “I love newsletters …” This is true, otherwise I wouldn’t have created the tool. So don’t really mean to extinguish the newsletters. I understand RSS users are a small niche when compared to email users. I also understand the business reasons to prefer mailing lists. The comments on this thread had some very interesting arguments on that topic. I certainly learned a lot by reading them. The name Kill the Newsletter! was supposed to be whimsical. But I understand death and specially killing are sensitive topics to some people and I apologize if I offended them with my joke. Still, I hope everyone can enjoy Kill the Newsletter! if they ever need to convert that mailing list into an RSS feed.
- jcrben 10y ago
  Great service, but you might be encouraging more annoying newsletters. Before, they just lost out an audience who wouldn't stand for annoying automated email ;)
webgurl83 10y ago
I've been looking for a service to turn email into RSS for a while, (email to RSS not RSS to email.) This will definitely do the trick!

343 points by ProfDreamer 10y ago

I'm so glad that someone built this. I have the same use case as the author where I just don't want newsletters to read, but that are time insensitive, intermingled with communication to people in my inbox. I'm excited to try this approach. I'd be interested to see what other solutions people have come up with to this problem.

icebraining 10y ago
A simple approach is to filter them in your email client into a folder/tag and out of the inbox. That's what I do for mailing lists (which aren't well suited for RSS, since they're threaded).
- tedmiston 10y ago
  That's what I do today but what often happens is I just never check them. Also some newsletters contain events or occasional time sensitive bits so partial filter has proved a challenge there. Curious to hear if you've experienced either of these.
  - jclos 10y ago
    I used to also filter them out to a folder with no unread tag until I realized that I missed quite a few free ebooks that O'Reilly was offering. Since then I still have them in a folder but I go mark it read once a day to make sure I don't miss stuff like time-sensitive offers.

doozler 10y ago

This service looks really awesome! I think there may be a slight spelling mistake on the first line of the "Introduction" section. It say's "I love newsletters, but I have receiving e-mails", should that be "hate" ?

leafac 10y ago
Hi doozler, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for the kind words and for pointing out the mistake. I fixed it :)

thecabinet 10y ago

NewsBlur does something similar. Forward your newsletters and they appear as an RSS feed. Works with any kind of email...

snksnk 10y ago
This! NewsBlur is awesome. For newsletters: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/146752875548/newsletters-in-your-newsblur http://blog.newsblur.com/post/146752875548/newsletters-in-yo... NewsBlur even has support for Twitter: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/145256277160/twitters-back-baby http://blog.newsblur.com/post/145256277160/twitters-back-bab...
Semiapies 10y ago
Similarly, Feedbin gives you an email address you can aim a newsletter at and see as another feed. It's kinda genius.
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi thecabinet, snksnk and Semiapies, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comments! I didn’t know of NewsBlur and Feedbin and it’s nice to see that other tools take similar approaches to the use case. It validates that my solution was appropriate. It’s unfortunate that NewsBlur and Feedbin bind the feature to their platform. But I guess it makes sense, Feedbin is even trying to make money. Anyway, whenever you need a free tool that doesn’t lock you in or ask for your personal information, I hope you consider Kill the Newsletter! an option :)
  - Semiapies 10y ago
    It validates that my solution was appropriate. It does! It’s unfortunate that NewsBlur and Feedbin bind the feature to their platform. But I guess it makes sense, Feedbin is even trying to make money. Unfortunately, this is nonsensical and obnoxious. I'm perfectly happy to pay for a service, given that "free" tends to mean "shuts down in a couple of years". And I'd have to pay for a server anyway if I wanted to run my own.
- 10y ago

tomislav 10y ago

Just a heads up that almost all Mailchimp newsletters (and many others) have RSS feeds. Just put the archive link into your RSS reader and it will autodiscover it. But this is great for those that don't. Great work.

justinator 10y ago
Yup, Dada Mail too (example: http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive_rss/dada_announce/ http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive_rss...) but only for the last, I dunno, 12 or so years.

ommunist 10y ago

Well, you can't effectively kill newsletter. Because newsletter COMES so you, and you have to CLICK to get feed.

chriswarbo 10y ago
It depends what level of abstraction you're working at. At the level of sockets, you're right that a mail server receives a connection from a sender when a newsletter is sent, whilst an RSS aggregator initiates connections to each feed's source when it polls, even if there are no new articles. At a lower level, the server's doing polling to check for new connections, but that's a fast local operation so it doesn't break the higher-level abstraction. I wouldn't say there's much difference from a user point of view, i.e. "clicking". Polling for feeds with an RSS reader is comparable to polling for new messages with a mail client. Both can be made fast by fetching mail and/or news in the background, either using a client or using an OS service.
- detaro 10y ago
  And feeds also have a (close to) instant notification mechanism in the form of W3C PubSub aka pubshubhubbub.
- ommunist 10y ago
  You are quite correct. But for vast majority of real world users RSS is quite misterious piece of technology. Emails are ok, everyone 'knows' what the email is? But 'feed'. Can I save it for offline use? Can I forward it to friends and family?
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    > But for vast majority of real world users RSS is quite misterious piece of technology. I would imagine that the "vast majority of real world users" of this email-to-RSS converter know exactly what RSS is :)
    - ommunist 10y ago

akamaozu 10y ago

Out of curiosity, what's stopping me from using this to sign up for services and having this app mahically keeping their emails out of my inbox, but neatly filed away for when I need it?

Tepix 10y ago
That's the idea. You poll the RSS feeds whenever you want to see if there's anything new. I.e. probably not that frequently.
leafac 10y ago
Hi akamaozu, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you for your interest. Nothing technically prevents you from using the tool in the way you propose. But I ask you not to, if you can. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12957555.

jypepin 10y ago

It's funny, last week I actually looked for the opposite! I don't use RSS and don't have a reader (since google dropped theirs) and so when I find blogs that interest me, I want to be able to subscribe via emails. Then I just add the updates I receive in the correct folder/tag and go back to read whatever I want, whenevr.

douche 10y ago
I do have an RSS reader, but it has become such a chore to keep up with it that I mostly don't bother. Picking the best content providers and getting a handful of emails a week from them is better than the cesspool of 6000 unread items that confronts me when I pull up RSS.
tedmiston 10y ago
I tried this approach but found that I'd get an email newsletter with 5–10 stories but I might only want to read 1 or 2. I'd like to only keep the ones of interest. Opening them and adding to Instapaper or Safari Reading List seems to work okay.

bikamonki 10y ago

I think we are moving towards a descentralized Internet. The RSS feed needs a central server, the newsletter can be broadcasted and then forwarded peer to peer. I'd argue the opposite then: save the newsletter, just maybe evolve it into something better (maybe with schema email??)

chriswarbo 10y ago
Sounds like Usenet :) RSS is probably easier to layer on top of those new fangled HTTP-over-P2P networks like IPFS. Heck, I remember proposals for combining RSS and BitTorrent, so an RSS feed could be spread via BitTorrent, with incremental updates being applied, and with each entry containing BitTorrent magnet links. This was proposed as a distributed way to provide podcasts ("podcatching"). Not sure if it got implemented.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  Usenet is, unfortunately, ancient and arcane enough that a vast amount of the the current veteran dev people never ever heard of it. It's an awesome thing, even though it has it's capacity limits, and it really should be revived ( and not the way it is at the moment, as a torrent replacement ).
- bikamonki 10y ago
  Yes of course, RSS over a distributed channel works as well!
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  NNTP is one of the most underrated protocols. It's a distributed superset of email + RSS + twitter.
  - dantheta 10y ago
    There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me. I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)

iagooar 10y ago

Kudos for making the source code available and allowing to self-host the service. If you are thinking about making some money with it, maybe one twist would be to be to offer a SaaS "proxy" between the newsletter and the subscriber, where subscribers enter their real email and search for newsletters they are interested in and convert them into a feed? Although TBH I'm not sure there is money in RSS readers...

tedmiston 10y ago
Also a few tweaks - make the UI easier to use on mobile - make feed title and feed URL fields appear together at the same time - send a test post to each newly created feed so I can confirm it's working That said, I'm not sure if OP is actually the author based on taking a glance at commit dates in the repo.
- leafac 10y ago
  Hi tedmiston, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you for your suggestions :) > - make the UI easier to use on mobile I don’t own a phone, can you please be more specific on the difficulties you had? I’d be happy to address them. > - make feed title and feed URL fields appear together at the same time To which screen are you referring? > - send a test post to each newly created feed so I can confirm it's working That’s a good idea. Of course, the sole fact that the feed exists with the title you gave is already confirmation that it’s working. Even if there are no entries. And, right after creating the feed on Kill the Newsletter! the user is probably going to use the email address the service gives to actually sign up to a newsletter. Upon doing that, the newsletter provider usually sends a subscription confirmation email that shows up as a feed entry. Still, I think one more confirmation wouldn’t hurt and I’ll add it. > That said, I'm not sure if OP is actually the author based on taking a glance at commit dates in the repo. You’re correct. I don’t even know ProfDreamer, but I’m glad he liked my work enough to post it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have received feedback such as yours :)
leafac 10y ago
Hi iagooar, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your idea, but my intent is not to make money with this. Let alone get a hold of users’ real email address :)

mike-cardwell 10y ago

I prefer to use my email clients to read my news. Means I don't have to run an additional application. I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I filter them into a "News" mail folder. I run K-9 Mail, Mutt and Webmail depending on what device I'm using. Thanks to IMAP my "news readers" stay in sync due to the "\Seen" IMAP flag, and the ability to delete messages. Thanks to IMAP PUSH I don't have to poll for new RSS items on my various client devices. Thanks to IMAPs subscribe I don't get News on devices I don't want it on. [edit] I use sieve to filter real newsletters into the same "News" folder, so it's a mixture of content from RSS feeds and newsletters.

Jaruzel 10y ago
> I have a script which monitors RSS feeds and turns them into emails. I totally keep meaning to do this. Glad I'm not the only one with this crazy preference!
- rahimnathwani 10y ago
  https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
pa19 10y ago
You can use http://blogtrottr.com/ http://blogtrottr.com/ to do this too
- collinmanderson 10y ago
  I use Feedburner, though despite being Google, it doesn't support feeds that use https :(
pmlnr 10y ago
I first used rss2email[1], moved on to writing my own initially as a WP plugin (using the blogroll links to pull from); it gradually evolved into a standalone python thing to support mf2[2] feeds. I do prefer RSS entries as email entries, therefore newletters and RSS feeds are more or less the same to me. [1]: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/ [2]: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed http://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed

shortformblog 10y ago

As a guy who runs a newsletter with a few thousand subscribers, I'm supportive of this idea. In fact, I put a lot of work into my RSS feeds knowing that people like this would exist. http://feed.tedium.co/ http://feed.tedium.co/ (Using FeedPress, if you're curious.) I see it less as killing the newsletter, and more as giving people options.

criddell 10y ago
I just checked out your site and uBlock blocked 27 requests and noted that loading the page involves 11 domains. Do you have any insight into what's being blocked and why so many domains are being accessed?
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Why don't you take a look at the uBlock log?
  - criddell 10y ago
    I never knew there was a log. So now that I look at it, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Judging by what's red, I think uBlock is mostly stopping the blog from tracking me. Also, the number of blocked requests is now 36. Not sure why it would keep climbing after the page is loaded.
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      Sometimes people defer loading of unnecessary JavaScript, like trackers, until after the page is "loaded", so that's why you might see the page appear to finish loading then more blocked requests appear in the seconds that follow.
- jimktrains2 10y ago
  Do you do this to every site? Everything I see is stuff like Google Analytics and Share this. Check your logs before asking a question you can answer yourself. If you have a specific complaint, then contact the admin or owner.

uptown 10y ago

Pretty sure publishers prefer newsletters because they get opened more than an RSS feed based on a few conversations I've had.

sanderjd 10y ago
That's why this (or something like it) is a good solution. Publishers can still send emails, but users can decide they prefer to read them through RSS.

yesimahuman 10y ago

Interesting idea that could co-exist with newsletters, but as a business person newsletters are the best. Seriously, nothing compares to a good list. Not Twitter, not Facebook, not Ads. It's gold.

tammer 10y ago

Nothing currently wins over the format or ease of use of newsletters. This is why they're becoming MORE popular as an engagement tool. I think there's a vacant startup space for a tool that can beat newsletters for ease of both entry on the sender side and engagement by the recipients in the many-to-many communication mode.

finchisko 10y ago

I personally prefer RSS over mailed newsletters. And was expecting that newsletters will eventually die. I was wrong. Not sure why they didn't died and actually grow more popular, but IMHO RSS is probably too complicated for regular Joe, so they probably not even know RSS exists. I'm only subscribed to newsletter when RSS is not an option, like js weekly, android weekly... But wish I can read those in digg/reader too.

vollmond 10y ago
Yeah, I would assume newsletters have a lot higher chance to be read... everyone I know has an email account, but only a subset bother with RSS. And even if you have RSS, chances are you have a lot of feeds you never read that just end up part of the furniture of your life.
- nf05papsjfVbc 10y ago
  Also, it's much easier to track the average person's actions when you send them an email vs when they have an RSS feed. So, all these websites that show a 'sign up for my newsletter' popup when you visit them, will not choose the RSS option. I hate tracking URLs, pixels etc. but I don't see how we can get them to not use them.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  Maybe RSS should rebrand as "textcasting" or something. Podcasts are popular, are not considered only for "power users", and are just RSS feeds of audio links.
petercooper 10y ago
Editor of JavaScript Weekly here - we do have RSS :) It's linked on the top of our site. We just don't put a lot of effort into it because e-mail is our top priority, but it's been there for a few years now. (Ditto for all our titles like Ruby Weekly, DB Weekly, WebOps Weekly, etc.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

bogomipz 10y ago

Tangential question here - can anyone comment on the recent-ish proliferation(explosion) of sites thats float an HTML 5 light box a few seconds after the page loads asking people to "Sign up now for our newsletter!" It's a pretty obnoxious practice. Newsletters aren't new of course but there seems to be a very enthusiastic renewed interest in them. Does anyone know why?

revicon 10y ago
Two reasons I've heard, but haven't tested out personally yet: 1) The pop up results in higher conversions (people actually filling out the email address field and hitting "subscribe") 2) The action of "closing" the modal popup confirms that the viewer of the page is probably a real human and that they genuinely made some kind of movement on the page (scrolling slightly, moving the mouse off the window, etc). This is supposedly taken into account by google, etc when judging page rank for pages.
- bjterry 10y ago
  Regarding 2, Google has started penalizing these popups, at least for mobile users. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easi...
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Thanks for the response. In regards to number 1 I would be very surprised for that to be true simply because these pages are asking people to sign up often before a user has had time to read the first couple of sentences in the opening paragraph. I guess this is the part that drives me nuts is that they don't give you time to read the content before asking so how would someone even make an informed decision before giving out their email address? Interesting about number 2. Is there still not an extension to block this HTML element?
- jessaustin 10y ago
  For 2, a less annoying arrangement might be to make sure the most important content continues past the fold, forcing anyone reading to scroll.

loserkiddo1 10y ago

hola

sametmax 10y ago

I would love to kill the newsletter. I love RSS. I perceive most newsletters as spam. Except: - non tech saavy users don't know what RSS is and often won't use a RSS reader even after tutoring. - newsletter still makes a LOT of cash. I didn't believe it, but working in the adult industry teached me that many things I would never do (read a news letter, click a ridiculous add, engage with an obviously fake profile) is actually common practice among the vast majority of users.

petercooper 10y ago
I perceive most newsletters as spam. You primarily receive newsletters you didn't actually sign up for? (stores you bought stuff off, etc.) That's the only way it's spam. But there are plenty of people who actively sign up for and appreciate them.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  When every website uses black-design to "helpfully" sign you up for their newsletter without you noticing, it gets harder and harder to differentiate actual newsletters that I signed up for, vs plain old spam. When in doubt, mark-as-spam it is.
- sametmax 10y ago
  I never sign up for newsletter, but I still receive plenty that I have to manually opt out.

olivierlacan 10y ago

While going back to RSS sounds like the virtuous move, the reason I believe most people are going back to newsletters is that email is an inbox people have to check and the likelihood of them viewing and acting on content that is delivered to their email inbox vs their RSS reader inbox is much higher. With no data to back this up I'd wager conversion rates (read x and click to see y linked within x) are at least double that of RSS. Possibly even much more. I've been an RSS user for years and I use it to subscribe to blogs mostly. Despite this, I would never subscribe to the RSS feeds of some of the most popular email newsletters I know and receive. With Google giving up on the Google Reader years ago, the market for well-designed, easily accessible, and free RSS readers sort of dried up overnight. I use Reeder for macOS, which is a paid (but cheap) app and I know full well this is a power user situation. I would never expect the overwhelming majority of users to get back on the RSS bandwagon unless browsers made it a first-class feature with a noticeable call-to-action on sites with available RSS feeds, an inbox letting me know new content has been published since I last checked, and a clean reading interface that mirrors what Readability, Instapaper, and others used to provide.

dwightgunning 10y ago
Exactly. The marketeers and Growth Hackers won the battle. That discussion around engagement was even had amongst RSS advocates when it came syndicating the full-text vs a summary (really,the lede) of a post/article. Anybody looking to monetise attention should be focussed on email.
jobigoud 10y ago
> an inbox letting me know new content has been published since I last checked I'm super happy with RSS and don't want to clutter my inbox. One difference with e-mail is that sometimes we don't care about some articles, especially on the high volume sites. In an RSS reader it will be bold as unread and this cause anxiety and make it harder to distinguish a newly arrived article vs the most recent unread article. I feel that for RSS we need three levels of flags: new, unread, read. Or "unread, read title, read article". In an e-mail inbox you will make sure everything is in the read status. In an RSS reader that amounts to too many janitor clicks.
10y ago

gilgongo 10y ago

RSS was all the rage back in about 2005. About time we tried again after failing to get it to work first time.

Leynos 10y ago
For some people, it never went away.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ourcat 10y ago

This appears to create Atom feeds, not RSS.

leafac 10y ago
Hi ourcat, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comment. Indeed, the tool generates Atom feeds instead of RSS. It is a better format. But RSS is a more popular term, so I went it. It’s like the TLS vs. SSL: I only use the term TLS with highly technical audience.

sincostan 10y ago

I've used emails2rss for a few years for mailing lists. Exists as a google app.

leafac 10y ago
Hi sincostan, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. Thank you for your comment. I tried the tool you mentioned before creating Kill the Newsletter! Of course, I was trying same work :) Unfortunately, I ruled it out for two reasons. First, it required a Google account, thus binding my identity with my reading preferences. Second, I set up a throwaway Google account just to test the service and it didn’t work. I can’t remember exactly why, though. It was definetly an inspiration for Kill the Newsletter! It gave me an indication that the project was feasible.

norswap 10y ago

Very useful! What worries me: when this eventually fails, I won't know it's not working anymore (partially the fault of my feedreader, but still).

leafac 10y ago
Hi norswap, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. That is a valid concern, thanks for bringing it up. I worry about this myself, being the #1 user of the tool. Do you have any idea how to fix it, though? I thought of a dead man’s switch kind of thing, in which I would periodically add an “everything is still working” for low-volume feeds, but I didn’t do it because I would consider such entries spam. What do you think?
- norswap 10y ago
  I don't really have a better suggestion. Ideally, making sure that the feeds would raise some kind of error condition in all feed readers, but I doubt there's something universal like that. Maybe the "still working" message is good enough, it wouldn't bother me too much, personally.

Ayraa 10y ago

I just created a separate email address to receive all the newsletters I enjoy reading but don't want to mix with my work/personal emails. I check it 1-2 times a week. Works beautifully.

necessity 10y ago

I gave up looking for such service a while ago, instead I just used twit2rss or the like (everyone with a newsletter is also on twitter it seems) and emailed the website suggesting an RSS feed in the future. Good to know it exists now.

allyjweir 10y ago

Great job on the project! I had this exact same idea about a week ago and put it on my Trello. Will definitely be taking a deep dive into your website for inspiration. Congratulations on shipping!

sengork 10y ago

For those who used to use Google Reader I can recommend www.netvibes.com

WillPostForFood 10y ago

Maybe we need to star with: Revive the RSS readers! Then move to killing the newsletters.

zizee 10y ago

I run a curated newsletter builder platform^, that includes subscription/delivery component. After reading this, I'm going to survey my users (email publishers) to see if enabling RSS subscription is something they are interested in... ^https://www.NewsMaker.io https://www.NewsMaker.io

leafac 10y ago
Hi zizee, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. I’m glad to know that my project inspired your idea. Feel free to generate NewsMaker RSS feeds using Kill the Newsletter!, if you’d like :)

bbcbasic 10y ago

Doubles up as a way to get an anonymous / throwaway email address. I just signed up a twitter account using it :-)

leafac 10y ago
Hi bbcbasic, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you for interest, I’m glad the tool was useful to you. While of course Kill the Newsletter! does work as a throwaway email address, I ask you to please not use it for that. I fear this might result in @kill-the-newsletter.com email addresses ending up in blacklists. Or that the service grows in a way that I couldn’t support with my $0 budget :) Finally, I can’t make strong guarantees of privacy and security for incoming emails. The security is through obscurity of the generated email address and corresponding feed URL, which is not a strong model. This is generally fine for newsletters—whose contents are public anyway—but not so much for signing up for a private Twitter account. Also, there are other tools like https://www.mailinator.com/ https://www.mailinator.com/ designed specifically for this use case. You’re much better off with them! And, when you want to convert that newsletter into an RSS feed, I hope you consider Kill the Newsletter! an option :)
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  Hi leafac, thanks for the response. I don't plan to use your service that way myself but thought I'd mention it so you are aware. I think its a great service for the original purpose though and I'll start using it for that.

leafac 10y ago

Hi all, Author of Kill the Newsletter! here. First, thank you ProfDreamer for finding my service and posting it here. Thanks too to everyone that took interest in Kill the Newsletter! and commented or wrote me emails. I appreciate the kind words and testimonials that the tool was useful to some of you. I also appreciate the suggestions for improvements, I’ll try to implement them in the near future. Kill the Newsletter! ended up on an LifeHacker article: https://lifehacker.com/kill-the-newsletter-converts-newsletter-subscriptions-i-1788953342 https://lifehacker.com/kill-the-newsletter-converts-newslett... As a long-time reader of the website, I’m flattered. Finally, I want to say a word about the name of the service. The copy on the website starts with “I love newsletters …” This is true, otherwise I wouldn’t have created the tool. So don’t really mean to extinguish the newsletters. I understand RSS users are a small niche when compared to email users. I also understand the business reasons to prefer mailing lists. The comments on this thread had some very interesting arguments on that topic. I certainly learned a lot by reading them. The name Kill the Newsletter! was supposed to be whimsical. But I understand death and specially killing are sensitive topics to some people and I apologize if I offended them with my joke. Still, I hope everyone can enjoy Kill the Newsletter! if they ever need to convert that mailing list into an RSS feed.

jcrben 10y ago
Great service, but you might be encouraging more annoying newsletters. Before, they just lost out an audience who wouldn't stand for annoying automated email ;)

webgurl83 10y ago

I've been looking for a service to turn email into RSS for a while, (email to RSS not RSS to email.) This will definitely do the trick!