Newsletter subscriptions via RSS
Newsletters in your inbox can be distracting to say the least. To solve the problem I’ve been sending them to Feedbin instead.
Feedbin is an RSS reader, but it also provides you with an email address for this exact reason. Use it when you subscribe to a newsletter, then you can read the newsletter in Feedbin, just like any other RSS feed.
For the past few years this is how I managed newsletters. That is, until I stumbled upon Kill the Newsletter. A clever little tool made by Leandro Facchinetti, which offers to roll any newsletter into an RSS feed, for free.
By combining this tool with a basic RSS reader, there’s potential to ditch Feedbin, altogether. That might appeal, if like me, you’re only sticking with Feedbin for the email address feature.
But let’s save RSS readers for another time. Instead I’d rather talk about killing the Newsletter and what it can do for you.
Killing the newsletter #
Head to https://kill-the-newsletter.com anytime you wish to sign up for a new newsletter. Give your newsletter a name and remember, this is the name that the newsletter will later appear as, in your RSS reader. So make sure it’s descriptive and memorable.
Hit “Create inbox” to generate a unique email address and RSS feed. It’s important you do this for each newsletter you wish to subscribe to. That way you can easily unsubscribe to newsletters independently.
Use the email address provided to sign up to the newsletter with. It will look something like this: k05ft3le3bra9ac7@kill-the-newsletter.com
Next, paste the URL provided into your RSS reader, so you can subscribe to the Atom feed. That URL will look something like this: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/feeds/k05ft3le3bra9ac7.xml.
As a little extra step, I decided to set up a Notion table to keep a record of each newsletter I’ve subscribed to. For each entry in the table I record the name of the newsletter, the email address I subscribed with and Atom feed URL, for reference. Now I can easily unsubscribe or remove the feed from my RSS reader.
Doing it yourself #
Turns out you might not even need Kill the Newsletter, either.
Chris Hardie figured out how to turn emails into RSS feeds using Zapier. Who doesn’t love a bit of Zapier wizardry.
Chris suggests an improvement to his approach would be to spin up email aliases for each newsletter. That way you can keep each newsletter as an independent feed and manage them easily.
To help with this you might turn to an email masking tool like SimpleLogin. But I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
Resources #
- Kill the Newsletter by Leandro Facchinetti
- This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!) from Nikki Usher
- Go digging in creates from Robin Sloan
- Put all those email newsletters in an RSS feed from Chris Hardie