Kill the Newsletter: Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

I like this service and use it myself. But I do find one thing unsettling about it: I run a blog that offers email subscriptions, but also provide direct RSS feeds (with prominent links!). For reasons I don't understand, large numbers of people subscribe using kill-the-newsletter. Which makes me sad, because then they don't get real tables, can't see post-publication corrections, don't get vector graphics, etc.

Err, the page doesn't explain why I would want to do this. What's the advantage of Atom, which can be read on a web page or a standalone client, versus email, which can be read on a web page or a standalone client?

I know some advantages of email:

* I already have an email reader that I use every day.

* The newsletter was designed for email, so it'll probably look better.

But what do I get by going with Atom?

It should also be mentioned that you can self-host this: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter

One very interesting thing about this is:

https://github.com/radically-straightforward/radically-strai...

  import server from "@radically-straightforward/server";
  import * as serverTypes from "@radically-straightforward/server";
  import sql, { Database } from "@radically-straightforward/sqlite";
  import html, { HTML } from "@radically-straightforward/html";
  import css from "@radically-straightforward/css";
  import javascript from "@radically-straightforward/javascript";
  import * as utilities from "@radically-straightforward/utilities";
  import * as node from "@radically-straightforward/node";
  import caddyfile from "@radically-straightforward/caddy";
  import * as caddy from "@radically-straightforward/caddy";

I subscribe to Readwise, their Reader portion is awesome in that I can subscribe to RSS feeds, but it also gives you a feed email (and a library email, which would be like Instapaper) that you can subscribe to newsletters with and they go directly into your feed reader as an item to be read.

Worth it imo, to just have it all in one place.

Suggestion: Currently the local part of the email and the management URL are the same. They should be different (and the URL should be treated as a secret).

Imagine I'm a mischievous newsletter publisher who doesn't like the idea for some reason: What prevents me from finding all subscribers with XYZ@kill-the-newsletter.com addresses, and then deleting all of them by visiting https://kill-the-newsletter.com/feeds/XYZ, or reading all other newsletters they are subscribed to by checking out https://kill-the-newsletter.com/feeds/XYZ.xml ?

And if you want to go full circle, you can use rss2email[0] to manage your RSS feeds in your favorite email client. Yes, even gmail.

rss2email was originally written by Aaron Swartz.

[0] https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

Ha, I did a PoC of this awhile back using lambda and SES and I was pleasantly surprised that it was relatively easy to do and worked pretty nicely, but eventually I went back to just reading all my newsletters (and unsubscribing from most of them...) in my email client rather than using a feed reader, so I decided it might not really make sense as a product.

I had the thought that maybe it would actually be neat to go the other direction, to be able to subscribe to feeds, but have new posts emailed like newsletters, but I never tried that out.

It's a great idea, though take a look if any newsletters you want to subscribe to offer their own feed as it's more likely to be resilient in the long term (sometimes services like this get bumped off of lists due to inactivity or bounces). I know Substack has RSS for all of theirs (whatever.substack.com/feed) as do all of my own ones (with a /rss suffix).

I have been using a similar service from a different provider (feedbin) and can vouch for the usefulness of this approach.

For a time, I used Android. The absence of a decent RSS reader on android made me jump back to iOS. My smartphone OS choice came down to being able to read newsletters as feeds.

Good idea, tho personally I've never encountered a newsletter that didn't have a feed for my RSS reader (Feedbro). Usually people use some web platform that happens to also email, rather than composing them in email

If you're using Thunderbird, you can have it recognize the newsletter emails and send them somewhere for processing, probably including ad removal.

Otoh: Sounds like good use for a dynamic email. Imagine sending links to full articles. The links open the content of the newsletter in the email.

I love the existence of both this and https://blogtrottr.com/.

If you're going around the email to get the content, how will these marketers be able to market to you or sell your email to a third party?

Inoreader let's you subscribe to email newsletters and have them show up in your reader

One week everyone wants email turned into rss, and the next rss into email

Hard no. When this services burst, every subscription made through it will die as well. Remember Stoop[1], “a newsletter app” which did the same trick? It's abandoned and stoped working a couple months ago.

[1] https://stoopinbox.com/

Make podcast of the newsletters

That’s what I really want

Yes! Let's make email human again.

all of these ideas that sound cool to a very techy type person, but "moms" are not going to do this. they enjoy getting these ads in their inbox. just because some techy type wants something does not mean the general masses wants the same thing.

this is already way more complicated than "moms" want to do: generate a new email, use that email in this new form, get a feed reader (wtf is that mom says). while this is perfectly fine for power users, it just makes me smile how often we forget there are a far larger number of non-power users that are out there