I like email as news letter though. It is decentralize. I can read on any platform, anywhere, search going back. flag, move them around in my folder however i want
Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
91–100 of 111 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#92I like email as news letter though. It is decentralize. I can read on any platform, anywhere, search going back. flag, move them around in my folder however i want
With email you also don't have to check 10 things every day.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#93Probably multiple forces affect sending newsletters to email inbox: - Client-side motivation : some users want to use their email as the "universal inbox". E.g. They may also send TODOs/reminders by sending emails to themselves instead of a separate app for alarms. Newsletters are just another stream of info that should conveniently go into their universal inbox. - Publisher-side motivation: email addresses are valua…
> RSS doesn't solve the same problem because that's a "pull" mechanism instead of "push" like email.
I don't think that matters. Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list.
Email is not exactly push anymore, it stays on a server waiting for the user to go there look. Any of them can, and usually do, automatically pull data on a schedule and alert the user when there's something new. The biggest difference I can see is that you and the user do not have to deal with the spam-handling problems. If the newsletter is spam, that's a big win for the publisher, but if it's not, it's a loss.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious: how do you learn your spam rate?
I had trouble with this back then. I used a home-baked email sender, emails looked good in mail tester and several mail clients, and yet, some of my test gmail addresses got the email in the Inbox, and some of them in Spam. I have no idea what was different.
And I doubt there is anybody at Gmail/google that actually knows.
It’s impossible to communicate with their support about it anyway
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#95Facebook was the place for newsletters for me. I didn't do much on a personal level, but it was an OK place to follow stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do I get notified of a new newsletter? Not OP but I use Inoreader for RSS. It has push notifications in the paid version, although I don't need them, I just open Inoreader when I'm in a newsletter-reading mood. > Tell us more about your reasoning. The reason email does not work for me is that my email inbox is overflowing with a variety of types of communication: business emails that require a quick reply, unso…
OK. (on a side note this is "Inbox bundles" solved elegantly in Google Inbox RIP) Anyway - I too have an overflowing inbox. I used to aim for Inbox zero but slipped and am living with it. One discipline I do maintain though is that the Inbox should always be actionable. It's my todo list. So - how do I handle non-actionable, non-urgent stuff? 1. If it will be urgent and actionable I snooze it. 2. If it's of interest…
The problem with newsletters of all sorts is that they end up in some sort of someday (but probably not) category whether they're explicitly filtered or not. Sometimes they end up in a Gmail tab that I mostly glance at infrequently. If I explicitly filter, I mostly stop looking at the filtering filter. I admit I used to use RSS a lot but these days mostly expect to find plenty of stuff through Twitter, HN, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The absolutely most important reason: everyone has an email address. It’s not just the least common denominator, it’s pretty much the only common denominator. RSS practically does not exist outside the tech scene.
Everyone having an email address is a false assumption, or a bad generalization. There are people among us without one, and owning a phone number instead. I'm not sure along which lines the divide falls though. Younger? Less western? Less businessy? It's still possible that the people who would be interested in a newsletter are the same people who have email addresses.
If you have a phone number, you probably have an email through a SMS/MMS gateway.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#98Probably multiple forces affect sending newsletters to email inbox: - Client-side motivation : some users want to use their email as the "universal inbox". E.g. They may also send TODOs/reminders by sending emails to themselves instead of a separate app for alarms. Newsletters are just another stream of info that should conveniently go into their universal inbox. - Publisher-side motivation: email addresses are valua…
> RSS doesn't solve the same problem because that's a "pull" mechanism instead of "push" like email. I don't think that matters. Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list. Email is not exactly push anymore, it stays on a server waiting for the user to go there look. Any of them can, and usually do, autom…
>Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list.
I mentioned "RSS" under the bullet point of publisher motivations and RSS being "pull" matters from the publisher's perspective because they want the email addresses.
With RSS, the publisher's server logs can see users' ip addresses (when client RSS readers scan the URL) but not users' email address.
Consider a real-life example of a publisher's perspective to make this distinction clear and to understand economic limitations of RSS:
E.g. Tim Ferris has a blog website.
- https://tim.blog/ - https://tim.blog/feed/ - https://tim.blog/comments/feed/ - https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/ email signup
- (no newsletter RSS url) has no RSS option
... and Tim Ferris will not allow a RSS url for the newsletter because building his email mailing list is the _purpose_ of his newsletter. He's willing to allow RSS readers to access the main blog but not the newsletter. This selective access is not inconsistent and it makes perfect sense if one understands the publishers' motivations.
Luckily for publishers like Tim Ferris, many users prefer their newsletters in their email inbox which aligns with publisher's preference to send them there.
(Yes to be pedantic, some hackers can fake out email newsletters by using Feedbin's email+RSS bridge mentioned in other comments but that's not relevant here because publishers don't care about the small minority doing that.)
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone having an email address is a false assumption, or a bad generalization. There are people among us without one, and owning a phone number instead. I'm not sure along which lines the divide falls though. Younger? Less western? Less businessy? It's still possible that the people who would be interested in a newsletter are the same people who have email addresses.
If you have a phone number, you probably have an email through a SMS/MMS gateway.
That's interesting, I have never seen that. Is it customary or well known in your area?
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters?
#100I'm a selfhosting nerd so I use Huginn to scrape the newsletters from my email and turn them into RSS feeds that I consume by converting them into an e-newspaper with Calibre. I also use ttrss's feature to republish articles via an RSS feed, plus Wallabag and it's RSS, to get bundles of long form content onto my Kindle. My Saturday morning ritual is then to open Calibre and download the last week's worth of Matt Levi…
I do something very similar. I've got mx records for a domain I own pointed AWS SES which invokes a lambda function that pushes the email to my Remarkable 2 e-ink reader.
I also enjoy reading Money Stuff this way.