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Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

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Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#51
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non-personalized newsletters it's pretty useless for you to give out an email address. No one's ever gonna address you individually so all it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address. The only benefit I can see even for non-personalized newsletters is that you have it in your mailbox and can use your normal email filtering tools to deal with newsletter messages.

it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address Is this the same class of privacy issue as, say, subscribing to a print journal that is delivered directly to your place of residence (as opposed to a post office box)? I think you could even argue that using anonymized email addresses for your newsletter subscriptions could be the digital equivalent of a PO box, right?

I think we mean the same thing, yes. (See my response to a sibling about newsletter hosts building interest profiles[1].)

The PO box analogy kinda falls apart unless you use a separate PO box per subscription but you're right, email aliases protect you from any kind of advertiser profiling. Feeds are just nice because they're simple HTTP requests so they don't have that problem in the first place (unless you're worried about IP-based tracking and don't use any kind of proxy).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26169411

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#52
By the way, I found thematic newsletters like Import AI or the Johns Hopkins University Covid newsletter very useful lately and have been looking out for more of them.

I want to stay up to date with what is happening in ML (and in the world) but don’t want to burn time manually opening up RSS readers, RedditML or news websites every day, given all their abusive time-stealing distractions and soul-crushingly dumb comments. I strongly prefer a weekly or daily carefully curated summary automatically delivered to my inbox. Hopefully these curated e-mail newsletters will become a thing again.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#53

Aside: a question for proponents of syndication (e.g. Atom, RSS) – as a publisher, are there other formats that should be investigated?

I'm inclined to say no.

RSS and Atom are great. And I wish I could get every newsletter as feed instead. Emails get lost in the daily avalanche, but RSS/Atom feeds know to wait until I have time to read. But they're already beset by problems with lack of adoption. Any alternative syndication tool is going to make it even harder to reach your audience.

I'd also be careful about platforms like Medium. I wanted to like Medium, I really did, but the algorithmic feed's constant stream of clickbait quickly grew tiring. I ended up muting it, newsletters and all. It seems to me that any platform that has an algorithm is setting up a hostile environment for people who don't enjoy producing or consuming clickbait.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#54

I think every email newsletter should offer an RSS feed as a matter of course. With all of ours, you just stick /rss on the end of the URL and off you go :-) e.g. https://javascriptweekly.com/rss With that said, I think there are some interesting opportunities for turning certain types of email into RSS feeds generally . I think it'd be really cool to have all of the random and very low priority emails landing at the…

Another HN today is talking about tracking pixels in newsletter mails so the sender can evaluate effectiveness.

I bet a general mail-rss bridge with many subscribers would make them sad.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#55
How about... we do both? Because it's not exactly too much effort to set up an atom and rss feed to go along with your email newsletter.

Can we stop (subtly in this case, not so subtly in others) crusading against tech that we don't personally like, when thousands upon thousands rely on it because that's the format they're comfortable with and want to receive periodicals in?

Set up a system that meets people where they are instead of forcing them into only your preferred delivery flavour.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#57

How about... we do both? Because it's not exactly too much effort to set up an atom and rss feed to go along with your email newsletter. Can we stop (subtly in this case, not so subtly in others) crusading against tech that we don't personally like, when thousands upon thousands rely on it because that's the format they're comfortable with and want to receive periodicals in? Set up a system that meets people where th…

Isn't that exactly what the submission is about? It seems to be a tool to convert any newsletter into an atom feed by creating a fake inbox. This lets everyone consume the content in their preferred format. Sure it would be nice if newsletters were available as news feeds too, but in the meantime this is a nice hack.

Re: Kill the Newsletter – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

#58

Ironically I convert atom feeds into email newsletters using rss2email. One less app to keep open.

Can you combine those two to get rid of privacy breaking stuff like tracking pixels? First sign up with Kill the newsletter to convert to rss, and then use rss2email to get a scrubbed version of the email?
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