Receiving RSS Feeds in E-mail
However, the real win in centralizing newsreading in email has come from RSS-to-email services. I’ve tried numerous RSS readers over the years but have never settled down with one because they require me to devote specific time to reading news. That requires remembering to do so and switching context. I actively want to see what’s new in my email every morning and throughout the day, but I never even think to launch an RSS reader. I have the same issue with Apple News, which languishes on my Mac and iPhone for weeks or months between launches. By employing an RSS-to-email service, new posts from blogs and other sites that provide RSS feeds can appear in my email automatically.
Which one to use? I’ve been testing three: Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, and Follow.it. Although the interfaces vary a bit, the basics are similar—enter a feed URL, configure a few options, and then sit back and receive an email for each new post. Each of these services offers a free account with paid upgrades that remove limits and provide additional features. Here’s how they compare.
I prefer an actual RSS reader, since I find it more efficient for following large numbers of feeds. However, I can see the appeal of having both RSS and e-mail news in the same app, and e-mail is nice in that it naturally creates an offline archive that can be searched later.
Alas, it does not look like any of these services supports non-RSS sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Previously:
- IFTTT Killing Legacy Pro Plan
- Twitter Now Requires Logging In
- Bad AppleScript: Fake RSS, Real Newsletter
9 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
And here I am today searching for an alternate to Feedly so I may receive email newsletters in my feed reader. I can no longer justify paying $12 USD per month for Feedly Pro+. Call me odd, but I do not like newsletters in my email mixed with priority mail.
I used to use RSS Mailer (rebranded Briefcake since) and I found the idea of having RSS entries once a day like a print newspaper appealing. Using it though I found that I prefer to browse the feed as a stream. My email app has inbox zero, my RSS reader has hundreds of unread.
I do like it for certain high profile feeds that I read almost everything from, but not for high frequency blogs that creates too much content of which I skip most of it.
RSS as email is actually how I read this very blog, through IFTTT. I used to have more subscriptions but IFTTT cut down on free usage so nowadays it's almost only this one. Nice to see that there are alternative services out there.
I've been using https://feedmail.org/ for a couple of things, similar to Adrian. It does what it says.
I wrote a script to generate a daily email containing all new posts from the feeds I follow (digest). Could build it out if there’s interest.
Remember when Google Buzz was shoved into G-mail? At the time I hated it and wanted my e-mail inbox clean for just... you know, e-mail. But looking back, I actually really wish I could get social media posts in their fullness via e-mail. I try to make use of Facebook e-mail notifications as a way of keeping up without actually having to visit Facebook, but it's less than ideal.
I can see why RSS in E-mail would be great for low-quantity blog posts or if you have few feeds to follow, but it would get overwhelming for the 800+ feeds I follow. Yet one big plus about getting feeds in your e-mail is you can add custom filters. A lot of feed readers keep that ability behind the "pro" paywall.
I feel like also Google Inbox was their way of uniting all this stuff too, but somehow it never really caught on. I think if some service ever managed to reliably pull together RSS, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit all in one app, I would pay for it. Share the profit with those services, run analytics on my reading habits that get forwarded back to the services, whatever. I just need simplicity from my side. It's too hard to follow everyone everywhere these days.
Yes, volume is a consideration but of course email has filtering, too. Also native cross-platform sync with no additional sync services or APIs required.
When I did this I used the self-hosted rss2email. I may yet go back to it, given that my feed reader of choice, lire, is adding very little beyond automatic full-text parsing through a public API, but you can self-host that too with Full-Text RSS, which generally does a pretty good job. I have yet to find options for scraping the popular platforms, but to be honest I'm not sure if I feel all that motivated to do it, particularly given Twitter's recent BS. It might just be easier to get that stuff vicariously through Mastodon or other blogs.
