Nice job, I think it's pretty cool how email has become such a versatile desktop for the world's information, transcending the messaging metaphor.
(It'd be interesting to see email become an application platform, also for convenience's sake, I mean since it's already reached such a baroque state anyway)
Now if it could be made _just_ a bit easier to host, maintain, migrate, and manage email accounts...
I agree wholeheartedly with your comment. I think there’s a lot of potential in FastMail championing the new JMAP standard in this regard, as email becomes both rich messages and a non proprietary, non locked in data repository you own and control (and can also migrate on a whim). Why can my messaging platform not retrieve RSS feeds and drop the posts into my inbox just as if they were emails?
What would you call such a platform (email with integrations on top, your mailbox represented as a document DB)?
>Why can my messaging platform not retrieve RSS feeds and drop the posts into my inbox just as if they were emails?
Vivaldi Browser does this with a built-in traditional Mail Client, and RSS feed items appear alongside All Messages|Unread by default. Both stored in the same SQLiteDB on disk.
Their Mail UI works so well there is even a vivaldi mod to simulate "email" sends via RSS (via websocket) just to take advantage of the app's inner message threading (in-reply-to) UI.
Killing subscriptions with no update in 90d seems a bit aggressive. At least for occasional blog feeds - perhaps it could be more intelligent, and do something based on a moving average of the timr between posts? Or simply send a 'do you want to stay subscribed' email?
My biggest question though is does it follow links and load the full content - I assume not, because it doesn't mention it, and it's technically out of scope for reading/forwarding RSS of course. It's just that a lot of feeds are all but useless without that in my experience, just headlines and perhaps short summary with a link.
I used to use feedbin which did a reasonable job of loading the full content in such cases.
It sends an email when you have been unsubscribed containing the rss link, if you wanted to subscribe for another 90 days you can reply to the email and it should subcribe again.
I had initially set it to 30 days but that got annoying. Before I set it to 90 I was considering making it more intelligent as you mentioned, an exponential backoff retry mechanism, but then I decided I was overcomplicating things and the server usage is almost nothing at the moment. :)
As for your other question, it only sends what is available via the RSS feed, I've been considering adding the ability for it to pull in more content, but I think that would be a separate service, like an RSS proxy which created another RSS feed containing more contents, people could then subscribe via that link or the original. Maybe that already exists?
On a related note, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that substack publishes RSS feeds of each and every blog hosted on its service. Sorta the opposite of this!
There's no way of accessing subscriber-only substack posts via RSS though, at least not without something else in the mix like a web scraper or a tool like kill-the-newsletter.
They do offer their own reader that aggregates all posts from substack you subscribe to and lets you add external feeds, which is nice, but then you're locked into that reader.
Well a simple solution is to generate unique feed links for each subscriber, make it infeasible to guess links, and monitor if a link is being shared too widely.
Since it's just http there are plenty of authentication options, but no standard. Various readers support some kind of auth though.
I'm glad you like it. I considered creating an elaborate SaaS style page, but then I thought, I'll most likely be the only user of this, I'll add a basic page in case anyone else wants to use it.
As the creator of this, it excited me to see this post in my inbox today.
I created rssby.email purely for myself, because I used to read articles from interesting blogs (via Hacker News) whilst commuting to work and wanted to subscribe to them, but I didn't have signal on the tube, so I would email the link to myself, then have to log into Feedly or whatever RSS reader I was using at the time and add it when I had signal, but then I would be at work so had other things to do :)
I'm glad to see a few people find it useful.
Side note: It would be interesting to know how people discover rssby.email as it doesn't seem to show up on Google.
I'm starting to not like the send time part of my design. I'm considering removing it and having it send whenever suits the server. Especially as my feeds go into a email folder and I only check them when I have free time anyway.
Reeder app, especially now that it comes with a decent iCloud sync and a free Read Later service. The one time pricing is very stressfree, not to mention their polished UX making for a very pleasant experience. If you're comfortable on an Apple platform there's Reeder for desktop and iOS and they're all solid. I do miss a feature or two from Feedly, but in general am a very satisfied convert.
Funny enough, it has the exact opposite feature of this submission and I love it. Email newsletters via rss reader.
I use email basically as a todo list, so emails that aren't very important (e.g. newsletters) get pushed out of my inbox quickly. This always have me an uneasy feeling, as I frequently felt rushed to read newsletters when I got them, which I never loved.
Now I can just check newsblur every few days/once a week, and I can read newsletters and whatever else when I'm in the mood!
I am currently not set up to read RSS feeds, but I want to set up Newsboat [1] for a machine connected to a real VT terminal and RSSMii [2] for my Wii connected to my tv.
https://kill-the-newsletter.com