Ask HN: RSS to Email Services

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2105860

by wtracy • 16 years ago

5 9 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I was looking for a service that would read RSS feeds for me, digest them, and send me a daily email with all the new updates.

The only surviving service that does this seems to be: http://www.feedmailer.net/

All the other supposedly better ones have gone defunct.

So, my question is, is this a product that's just hard to monetize, or is this a product that there's genuinely no demand for? I would expect to see dozens of services for this, like there are for url shorteners.

taylorbuley• 16 years ago

This is usually where a HNer comes in and says they're working on this kind of idea.

And wouldn't you know it -- hey, I'm working on this idea!

antonioe• 16 years ago

Mailchimp has something like this. It's a god send if you've got a constant updates, a bit of css knowledge and a readership.

wtracy2• 16 years ago

I'm looking for something that I, as a subscriber, can use to convert RSS to email.

I know that there's already tons of mass email tools for bloggers.

dangrossman• 16 years ago

There's no reason you can't use MailChimp, sending to a list of one subscriber. It's free, too.

vially• 16 years ago

Summify seems to be doing something like this. http://summify.com/

AndyParkinson• 16 years ago

I have thought a lot about this whole email-based service thing and its viability as a business. I'm not sure its something I'd want to go into.

I made something that is uses email for 95% of my interactions with it. It allows me to remove some friction between email and other activities by setting up forwarding addresses that can be configured to do one of three things:

1) Forward a receipt to a unique address that will convert the receipt to a pdf and forward the pdf as an attachment on to our bookkeeper.

2) Forward any email to a unique address and my tool will post the email + attachments to a Campfire room that is associated with the unique address.

3) Forward any email + attachments to a unique address and the email will be converted to PDF, then posted with the attachments to a folder in my Dropbox account that I associated with the address.

It is incredibly useful. It saves me and my people minutes of time every day and I've considered releasing it to the masses.

Here's the rub...I'm not interested in just giving it away since its a set it and "it just works" solution, so advertising is unlikely to cover hosting, let alone support or ongoing development. People may pay for it, but there are too many examples of mostly email-based services going belly up.

I believe these email-type services are just hard to monetize, even if they are useful and in demand. It is hard to keep something going when each new user means more money down the tube.

metachris• 16 years ago

Yes -- I want this too!

I actually don't think it would be very hard to get a first version which does the job well...

- Auth: Registration (with email verification, and OpenID/OAuth), Login, Logout

- DB: Users, Feeds, ...

- Feed crawler

- Mail sending: Instantly or digests (configurable intervals), properly setup email server or proxy

- Simple web-interface that gets out of the way. It's a simple job, after all.

- ?

If enough people want something like this and vote this post up, I would give it a shot over the weekend and put the code up for everyone to improve/fork/whatever.

caffo• 16 years ago

I made a simple ruby script to do that a couple years ago. It's available here: https://github.com/caffo/rssdigest

Ask HN: RSS to Email Services

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