Show HN: Easy RSS to Email Service

by kevincox • 5 years ago

12 5 5 years ago

kevincox3• 5 years ago

Hi HN, I've been reading RSS feeds via email for years now but wasn't happy with the hosted services available and found most of the self-hosted options to be too hard to configure (I didn't want to edit a config file or run a command to change my feeds). I created FeedMail to fulfill my needs and decided to make it available to everyone.

Key features:

- Multiple email addresses.

- Very simple templates, preserve as much source formatting as possible.

- No limits on number of feeds subscribed to.

- No ads. Our revenue model is very clear.

FeedMail is a consumer-focused service, there are many publisher-focused RSS-to-Email services for marketing campaign but the incentives are different so I am staying away from that use case.

derekzhouzhen• 5 years ago

Nice idea. Do you poll the feeds periodically? If so, how soon?

If multiple users are subscribing to the same feed, do you poll just once or one for each subscriber?

kevincox3• 5 years ago

There is some write-up in the feed-owner FAQ. https://feedmail.org/feed-owner-faq#poll-rate

Currently we poll feeds 1h by default, up to every 15min if the website has a cache header, and as slow as every 24h if the cache header asks us to (basically "caching" the poll for that long).

I will implement WebSub soon to get real-time updates for feeds that support it but I have a couple of UX items to clean up first.

And yes, we do coalesce on the backend if a feed has multiple subscribers.

eduardosasso• 5 years ago

Looks like https://mailbrew.com might be in your arena?

kevincox3• 5 years ago

Definitely in the same space but a very different approach. It is locked into digest emails, whereas right now FeedMail doesn't support digests at all.

Personally I prefer getting items separate. It is much better for longer-form content (which is most of my feeds) as I can read items one-by-one and mark them as read, forward them or filter them individually.

I know that everyone is different, and I may add digest support eventually (but it is far down the list to be honest) so I'm glad that both services can exist.

Show HN: Easy RSS to Email Service

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