28 ms·
Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds
- NAR8789 6y agoFYI, the author has a patreon: https://www.patreon.com/leafac https://www.patreon.com/leafac (I hunted this down by clicking through to his bio first. Not sure why he doesn't put a link to it on the kill-the-newsletter front page) (Not associated with the author in any way. Just a happy user)
- ChrisLTD 6y agoI love this service. I use it to subscribe to a few newsletters in Feedly that don't offer RSS feeds. The paid versions of Feedly and Feedbin also offer this functionality directly if you prefer to pay for the privilege of consuming newsletters in your RSS reader.
- briandoll 6y agoCame here to say this, love how this works in Feedbin: https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsletters-in-feedbin/ https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...
- Semiapies 6y agoYeah, I'd be all over this service, but I'm a Feedbin user. I'm reminded of 15-20 years ago, when there were services to create RSS feeds of webcomics that didn't have them.
- firloop 6y agoDefinitely a great tool. I used to use it but now mostly use the Newsblur native version of this feature. I blogged about my specific stack for reading newsletters because it takes a surprising amount of configuration to read newsletters in a streamlined way. Once you get a Gmail filter set up for the big services like Substack it becomes pretty painless though. https://ylukem.com/blog/how-to-keep-up-with-newsletters https://ylukem.com/blog/how-to-keep-up-with-newsletters
- acco102 6y agoUse https://mailnesia.com/ https://mailnesia.com/ or https://tempr.email/ https://tempr.email/ and rss.
- unicornporn 6y agoI use this: https://notifier.in/ https://notifier.in/ Same thing, works well. Newsletters are plague.
- ghaff 6y agoI wouldn't call them a plague but it's easy to drown in stuff being pushed out via email. So you end up filtering and it all goes into a folder you never look at.
- dewey 6y ago> Newsletters are plague. That really depends on how you use email. I always have a very empty email inbox and newsletters stay there until I read them (I'm talking about newsletters from people, not the latest deals on some ecommerce website).
- mikece 6y agoWhy Atom instead of RSS? I understand the differences between the two formats[1] but I am curious what it is about Atom that caused the maker of this project to choose it over RSS. [1] http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-rss-and-atom/ http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-betwe...
- lucideer 6y agoThe article you link lists numerous advantages to using Atom over RSS (and no advantages to RSS). Why would you consider RSS over Atom?
- billyhoffman 6y agoThat article also has an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE, and wastes a request trying to load JavasScript for Google Plus.... this is not up-to-date information. The "advantages" are minor at best, and exclusively relevant to a developer, with very little impact on the end-user
- kemayo 6y ago> exclusively relevant to a developer Which would presumably be why the developer chose it, yes.
- lucideer 6y agoI wasn't expressing any opinion one way or the other, nor did I provide the article as a reference. The original commenter seemed to be questioning the choice of Atom over RSS, and that article is what they posted as their reference; which seemed odd to me since it argues for using Atom over RSS. Why would you consider RSS over Atom (you seem to exhibit a preference but you have also neglected to list any of the reasons)?
- chrismorgan 6y agoNot exclusively relevant to a developer. I have one or two things in my feeds that can’t be expressed in RSS, such as HTML markup in my titles (which I use for <strong>, <code> and I think <em>). I also have angle brackets in a title, which I would be afraid to do in RSS because I’m confident that some clients would butcher it, and they wouldn’t even be wrong since RSS don’t care.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y agoWhat's wrong with email newsletters? I actually like them quite a bit.
- ChrisLTD 6y agoFor me, they get lost amidst the mountains of other email I get. I also don't like reading longer form content in my mail app. Having them sent to an RSS reader where I'm already reading news is a nice way to avoid those clashes of context.
- tutuca 6y agoAnd the format is in a some kind of revival. Some of the best content I get is from newsletters these days.
- t0astbread 6y agoFor non-personalized newsletters it's pretty useless for you to give out an email address. No one's ever gonna address you individually so all it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address. The only benefit I can see even for non-personalized newsletters is that you have it in your mailbox and can use your normal email filtering tools to deal with newsletter messages.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y agoI guess I've just never really considered my email address as some kind of secret thing that warrants a privacy concern.
- t0astbread 6y agoNeither do I, really, but I would be concerned about newsletter hosts being able to build a profile of my interests based on what I'm subscribed to. If I can just use Atom/RSS over HTTP instead I can avoid that easily.
- Fogest 6y ago
- raybb 6y agoI've used this a good bit and struggled with two things: 1. Newsletter formatting sometimes gets broken and comes out ugly 2. For longer newsletters or digests I sometimes skim too fast since I'm used to having single articles in rss feed. I guess this is more a comment on my reading habits with rss.
- benlumen 6y agoNice idea. Related - Is there anything that can add the select number of Twitter accounts I want to follow to this Atom or RSS feed? Without exposing myself to toxic replies, toxic suggested tweets and toxic trending topics? I've thought for years there should be something like that. Presumably it's a grey area with APIs or scraping.
- erikschoster 6y agoI follow a couple friends via the RSS feed created by nitter.net: https://nitter.net https://nitter.net
- filmgirlcw 6y agoI’m sure there's a way to do it but Twitter dropped RSS/Atom support from their API in 2012 [1], so it would require scraping or using some sort of other endpoint-managed control of the feed. There have historically been usage limits on how many tweets you could retrieve without paying, but I’m not sure how much that has changed since Twitter overhauled its API last year. It’s a shame that many of the tools and features we had a decade ago no longer exist, not because of technology, but because of decisions social networks made for business reasons to eschew open standards and create their own walled gardens. [1]: https://mashable.com/2012/09/05/twitter-api-rss/ https://mashable.com/2012/09/05/twitter-api-rss/
- Fogest 6y agoIt all comes down to ads. Twitter can't show ads so easily via API's. I think I even remember Twitter considering sticking ads in batches of tweets pulled from the API. Can't recall if they did it or not or if I'm misremembering.
- firloop 6y agoNewsblur does let you follow Twitter accounts; they have an API integration. Tweets from accounts you follow show up as stories in your reader.
- Ambroisie 6y agoI believe you can use Rss-bridge to follow Twitter users.
- kleer001 6y agoWhy not both? Some people have good control over their email inbox. Some don't.
- asdff 6y agoHonestly email tooling is sort of junky that it makes it hard to consistently apply rules. I use mac OS mail, so maybe that's why. Rules seem to be selectively applied, and if you try to get fancy with multiple conditions don't be surprised if the results vary. Also, none of this has feature parity with iOS, so rules are only applied if my macbook is open and actively applying them; my iPhone doesn't have the ability to process rules itself. Maybe this could be fixed with some third party software, but I'd rather not grow dependent on the continued mercy of third party software developers as I've been burned doing that too many times before. All of this headache, however, is eliminated if you just move this sort of content to a decent feed reader to begin with, where every single option out there has filtering options baked in.
- JustSomeNobody 6y agoI think we should go the opposite way. I think we should push more onto email. email is pretty ubiquitous. Nearly everyone online has email. It's as close to universal as anything else for accessing people. Instead of having a dozen different chat apps, push chats to email. Instead of a half dozen Slack wannabe apps, push all that to email. We should expand the email protocol to support that.
- t0astbread 6y agoTwo reasons why I don't think this is a good idea: 1. Mixing different applications in one inbox would be a mess for a lot of people (e.g. your IM would drown out important work email) 2. Privacy - avoiding unique online identifiers when they're not needed is a good idea
- W00kasz 6y agoI solved 1 by using an alias of my email for reading (e.g.,myemail+reading@gmail.com), using that to subscribe to newsletters, create a filter in Gmail to have anything sent to that email skip my inbox and apply a "reading" label, then use the multiple inboxes feature in Gmail to display a distinct section for emails sent to that alias. It works really well for me and keeps newsletters from cluttering things. I also have a Gmail label widget on my android phone that opens up my Gmail app straight to the reading label. It all works like a charm!
- betwixthewires 6y agoWhile we are at it, let's put everything you could possibly need into the browser... Sure, a little snarky but I'm getting my point across. We have different tools because different situations require different tools. IM exists because it is used differently than email, and email is not well suited to real time back and forth short messages. Atom and RSS feeds exist because honestly someone doesn't need to know your email address for you to take an interest in what they publish.
- petercooper 6y agoI think every email newsletter should offer an RSS feed as a matter of course. With all of ours, you just stick /rss on the end of the URL and off you go :-) e.g. https://javascriptweekly.com/rss https://javascriptweekly.com/rss With that said, I think there are some interesting opportunities for turning certain types of email into RSS feeds generally. I think it'd be really cool to have all of the random and very low priority emails landing at the 101 spare domain names I have to turn up in a single feed somehow rather than be forwarded.
- imglorp 6y agoAnother HN today is talking about tracking pixels in newsletter mails so the sender can evaluate effectiveness. I bet a general mail-rss bridge with many subscribers would make them sad.
- samizdis 6y agoIn case anyone's missed it, that's this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26162513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26162513 - from the BBC article 'Spy pixels in emails have become endemic' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56071437 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56071437
- augusto-moura 6y agoDon't really needs a thread, using images for email tracking is a old and well known technique, but whatever maybe there are more people that don't know that in the end
- tgragnato 6y agoI usually put a curl for the tracking pixel in cron when the plain text version is not available
- chris37879 6y agoI seem to recall years ago google was looking to make that sort of thing useless because they would always download all images in an email and serve them from their cache... wonder what changed?
- dddddaviddddd 6y agoIronically I convert atom feeds into email newsletters using rss2email. One less app to keep open.
- neogodless 6y agoHa! I had almost forgot. About a decade ago (time frame made up / guessed) I used Thunderbird as my RSS reader. Just checked and it can still do that. Since it's my primary email reader, voila! (But I use Feedly.com web site on computer and Feedly app on phone now which is easier for managing RSS than Thunderbird by a mile. Though looking below there is Export/Import of feeds, I'm not sure there's a way to just sync them up everywhere. And I don't use Thunderbird on my phone!) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...
- beagle3 6y agoI used to use thunderbird to read RSS. The problem though is that if you don’t poll often enough (and for some feeds, that’s every few hours) you’ll miss articles and updates — and my laptop is sometimes off for a couple of days. I’ve switched to NewsBlur a few years ago. Happy paying customer. (But bot affiliated). The bonus is synchronized phone/laptop/desktop reading status.
- xpil 6y agoI've been using NewsBlur since G killed Reader. Great service!
- wiw2 6y agoOne of my favorite hacks: I made a google appscript that scans a list of RSS feeds to email weekly digests. Surprisingly simple, and much more useful then running a separate RSS reader in my opinion. I have to confess: little automations like this with low barrier of entry is where I find most value in tech. Simple and practical.
- cameronbrown 6y agoI actually built something that was the complete inverse, RSS to email. Avoiding email because your inbox is full is like deciding not to drive because you didn't fill up the petrol tank. It's just putting a problem off to the future.
- hansy 6y agoEven for my own newsletter (https://funnies.page https://funnies.page) I set up email filters so I wouldn’t get email notifications in the morning. Eventually added RSS and the option to disable emails entirely.
- frankfrankfrank 6y agoWhat am I missing? You name the feed and then get a link to subscribe to it. How does the supply side actually provide the newsletter/content that will be distributed to that address?
- rmetzler 6y agoYou also get an email address to subscribe to the email list with.
- Glench 6y agoI love this service. Been using it for a long time and have switched all my newsletters to it. Now I get so many fewer emails. As the creators of Hey figured out, it's wonderful to have a separate feed of newsletters since they're fundamentally different than other types of email — they're generally not urgent and don't need to be acted upon. I keep mine in my RSS reader BazQux.
- rmetzler 6y agoI love that the author is doing code reviews on youtube and shows his own opensource code for the service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMTb3Z-QiPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMTb3Z-QiPY
- 1MachineElf 6y agoIt's almost 2 hours AND thorough. Impressive.
- petecooper 6y agoAside: a question for proponents of syndication (e.g. Atom, RSS) – as a publisher, are there other formats that should be investigated?
- onli 6y agoNo. You need only one, either Atom or RSS.
- Fogest 6y agoI believe you can also however add on to Atom/RSS. Many feed readers now also support the WebSub [1] standard which allows them to receive instant push notifications of new articles. It kinda speeds up getting things as you don't have to rely on exclusively the pulling model. Sites like WordPress, Blogger, FeedBurner, Mastodon, and Friendica I believe are all examples of sites that support it. It basically extends Atom/RSS to have another feature. Clients that don't support it can still pull like normal. Wikipedia summarizes the technology a bit nicer than the first link [2] [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
- onli 6y agoThat's correct. Some might still now it under the old name from when it was a google initiative, pubsubhubbub :)
- mumblemumble 6y agoI'm inclined to say no. RSS and Atom are great. And I wish I could get every newsletter as feed instead. Emails get lost in the daily avalanche, but RSS/Atom feeds know to wait until I have time to read. But they're already beset by problems with lack of adoption. Any alternative syndication tool is going to make it even harder to reach your audience. I'd also be careful about platforms like Medium. I wanted to like Medium, I really did, but the algorithmic feed's constant stream of clickbait quickly grew tiring. I ended up muting it, newsletters and all. It seems to me that any platform that has an algorithm is setting up a hostile environment for people who don't enjoy producing or consuming clickbait.
- DanielleMolloy 6y agoBy the way, I found thematic newsletters like Import AI or the Johns Hopkins University Covid newsletter very useful lately and have been looking out for more of them. I want to stay up to date with what is happening in ML (and in the world) but don’t want to burn time manually opening up RSS readers, RedditML or news websites every day, given all their abusive time-stealing distractions and soul-crushingly dumb comments. I strongly prefer a weekly or daily carefully curated summary automatically delivered to my inbox. Hopefully these curated e-mail newsletters will become a thing again.
- TheRealPomax 6y agoHow about... we do both? Because it's not exactly too much effort to set up an atom and rss feed to go along with your email newsletter. Can we stop (subtly in this case, not so subtly in others) crusading against tech that we don't personally like, when thousands upon thousands rely on it because that's the format they're comfortable with and want to receive periodicals in? Set up a system that meets people where they are instead of forcing them into only your preferred delivery flavour.
- sgeisler 6y agoIsn't that exactly what the submission is about? It seems to be a tool to convert any newsletter into an atom feed by creating a fake inbox. This lets everyone consume the content in their preferred format. Sure it would be nice if newsletters were available as news feeds too, but in the meantime this is a nice hack.
- iamdamian 6y agoI’d guess that the OP is responding to the phrase “kill the newsletter” rather than the specific tool.
- TheRealPomax 6y agothat. It's a perfectly fine tool, but "kill the newsletter" is an incredibly bad rallying cry and should be questioned.
- dethos 6y agoNewsblur, which is a very good feed reader, has this feature built-in which is super handy to keep all this stuff in one place.
- ink_13 6y agoWorth noting that Substack already publishes feeds at YOURNAMEHERE.substack.com/feed There are other newsletter publishers, of course, but that seems to be the one I get the most from.
- kureikain 6y agoI think it came down to personal preferences. I tried to use RSS but it's yet another app that I cannot form a habit to check it. Plus I like the personal look and feel of each email newsletter I got. I instead of relying on email as a real time news feed. But getting too many emails I have to category and make miss some exciting development news. I though of this, why not combine all of the newsletter and display them on a single page, easy to remember URL that I can check anytime. And make this: https://hanami.run/channel/devnews https://hanami.run/channel/devnews The idea is I can have many channel, each channel subscribe to a bunch of newsletter and I just read them from here. Example my morning news: https://hanami.run/channel/news https://hanami.run/channel/news
- syoc 6y agoRSS being pull and not push is a great feature IMO. You check up on your feeds when you want to, if you never do it might not really be worth your time or you might not enjoy it. If you really want some kind of reminder then some readers like tt-rss can send daily digest.
- Fogest 6y agoI use FreshRSS which is similar to tt-rss. I really think I should turn on email digests in it because I often find myself forgetting to check my reader some days and then it feels cumbersome to try and "catch-up" with the feeds. I actually really like the idea of being able to convert newsletters into RSS feeds. I have a decent amount of newsletter I currently get and for a lot of them the only reason I have them in newsletter form is because they offered no RSS option. So if I wanted to stay up to date one of my only options was newsletters.
- smoe 6y agoI kinda abandoned email as a tool of communication long ago and just use it to centralize slow notifications. Slow meaning, things I kind of like or want to know about eventually but not important enough to show a distracting notification on screen. Having them filtered gives me a way to more or less easily check in every now and then what is happing on a given topic But for me, the more import aspect is being in charge when to use a tool than what the tool is and having habits around it.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoOmg, newsletters and email groups work so much better than most other attempts to replace. Are there data that support this claim, though?
- gxqoz 6y agoIt's been a long time since I've used an RSS reader. I've moved to a read-it-later app like Pocket. Do any RSS readers provide all of the following functionality: -Let me highlight / add notes. -Randomly add things not in my usual RSS feeds, i.e. from some website I'm browsing. -Listen to articles via text to speech. -Work well across web, iOS and Android. I've been less and less happy with Pocket as it's clear that it's become less of a priority for Mozilla.
- hiidrew 6y agoThat's funny, I've always thought about a project that does the opposite since I love newsletters but not ever RSS source supports them
- synergy20 6y agoActually I rely more and more on email(newsletters) after all these years. I subscribed to quite a few newsletters and each morning I just check the inbox, no need to visit 10+ different sites, it's all in my inbox and mostly I just need browser them and click on a few subjects I'm truly interested, thus less time spending on ads from different sites. I installed a RSS extension on the browser and still ended up back to the inbox, I disabled the RSS reader a while ago.
- leafac 6y agoIt’s a nice surprise to check HN and have my project featured on the front page. Thanks polm23 for posting and everyone else for the nice words!
- betwixthewires 6y agoThank you for creating this! I'm an avid user of RSS and Atom, and I absolutely loathe email subscriptions (although I understand why many groups use them), so a tool to remove that friction for admittedly rare people like me is wonderful. Thank you for running this service, I intend to use it quite a lot!
- ymolodtsov 6y agoSeems it'd take significant costs to run it, how do you still manage to do that?
- leafac 6y agoThe most significant cost has been my time, but that’s my pet project in which I get to experiment with new technologies, so it pays off nicely. Also, you can support me: Recurring (Patreon): https://patreon.com/leafac https://patreon.com/leafac / One-time (PayPal): https://paypal.me/LeandroFacchinetti https://paypal.me/LeandroFacchinetti In terms of server costs, it all runs smoothly on a $6/month DigialOcean droplet. Even when I end up on the front-page of HN (it’s the second time this happens). And there’s also the ~$10/year for the domain. There’s actually a fun story behind this: The biggest constraint is bandwidth (~500GB/month). I was using S3 and at some point that’d amount to $50/month. But DigitalOcean droplets give you 1TB/month, so to save money I rearchitected the whole thing to just use the filesystem. It turned out to be simpler and nicer to maintain, too. Fewer moving parts. Fun stuff…
- kvothe_ 6y agoNice! Would be cool if you display a list of newsletters. "Recently added []"...
- avrionov 6y agoWhy does it need to be "kill"? Why not "improve the newsletters"? All email killers failed to kill email.
- dirtyid 6y agoI throw my newsletters in a shared folder and use various TTS programs to listen to them as podcasts. Working to cobble together a manual but not particularly intensive process where news letters are aggregated into a podcast with newsletter as transcript with timestamps. Some podcast apps have bookmark/note support which is a bonus, though non are cross platform. Ideal setup is physical button press will highlight current sentence and spit out a summary. I can see a service with some sort of collaboration system especially with improving TTS quality.
- tus89 6y agoI quite like weekly wrap-up newsletters, like Python Weekly. I prefer RSS for just about everything else though.
- jimmaswell 6y agoI already get emails on my phone and they're a natural medium for a newsletter. Why would I want to install another app for the same thing?
- javchz 6y agoI love this. I have missed a lot of great newsletters because of a false positive spam detection. As a content creator, I also would love to see the comeback of RSS VS email, as services like mailchimp can get expensive really fast for projects that not seek profit like a personal blog. A simple wordpress, ghost or even blogspot scales more cheaply than all the requirements for massive email.