My RSS reader service also provides an email address for email-only subscriptions: <a href="https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsletters-in-feedbin/" rel="nofollow">https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...</a> . I read email newsletters in the same place as RSS. I'm subscribed to a few low-volume Twitter searches too (<a href="https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-to-read-twitter/" rel="nofollow">https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-...</a>).
Probably multiple forces affect sending newsletters to email inbox:<p>- 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.<p>- Publisher-side motivation: email addresses are valuable because it's important to "build an audience" outside of centralized platforms like Patreon/Youtube/TikTok. RSS doesn't solve the same problem because that's a "pull" mechanism instead of "push" like email.<p>If the above factors are unimportant to a particular person, then yes, the email inbox is a suboptimal communications channel for newsletters.
How do I get notified of a new newsletter?<p>For me my Inbox is the only place I'm guaranteed to visit regularly. If a notification is on any other platform then I might not ever know about it.<p>But then - you haven't really explained what you mean. Do you mean in terms of rendering? notifications, sharing?<p>And it depends on your relationship to email vs other platforms. Tell us more about your reasoning.
I switched all my email newsletters to RSS newsletters with <a href="https://kill-the-newsletter.com" rel="nofollow">https://kill-the-newsletter.com</a> and my life has gotten so much better.<p>I was inspired by the design of Hey email, whose designers reasoned that newsletters aren't really that important, they should just be something you scroll through and separate from other email which often needs a response.
I <i>need</i> everything to go to my inbox, including newsletters. It's the only place I'm guaranteed to look besides SMS and my calendar.<p>Then I just process them together with everything else -- take a quick glance at headlines, archive if nothing interesting, keep it in my inbox if I want to read it sometime today, label it if it seems long and I want to keep it for later reading at leisure.<p>The <i>last</i> thing I want is yet another delivery mechanism I have to check.<p>If you have a problem with e-mail overload, it's not going to be solved by <i>adding another</i> information source. It's going to be solved by tackling it head-on in your e-mail, and there are lots of methods.
As others have said, I use an RSS reader for this sort of thing. Many newsletters provide a blog/syndicated version anyways which I can subscribe to, and there are bridges available. That being said, I don't have a bridge so for ones that are only available by email I setup filters and put them into folders unless I want to read them every single week (in which case I do think the inbox it the best place).<p>If you do decide to go the RSS route, I use <a href="https://www.inoreader.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.inoreader.com</a> and haven't found a better web-based/has a phone app one yet. The others I tried were all full of nonsense AI that kept bugging me, or weird javascripty fancy UIs that broke, or just didn't let me read inline (you had to click through to pages). Other recommendations welcome though.
It is! I now use Kill the Newsletter [0] for those newsletters that don't offer an RSS feed.<p>[0] <a href="https://kill-the-newsletter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://kill-the-newsletter.com/</a>
My problem is not newsletters. I happily send those to a Newsletters folder via a filter.<p>My problem is companies sending important non-newsletter stuff in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from a filter point of view to their newsletter emails.
I'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.<p>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.<p>My Saturday morning ritual is then to open Calibre and download the last week's worth of Matt Levine newsletters to my Kindle, which I then enjoy on my porch with a coffee.
No, I prefer my newsletters to my inbox over anywhere else. I have an inbox zero workflow, so if I don't have time for in-depth item right away, I print it or save a PDF to my iPad reading list for later review.
I'm on the other side of the issue. I have 10000 subscribers with a 0.6% Spam rate. That's technically high, despite me getting all emails voluntarily and not even offering a freebie for signing up.<p>Anyway, can't use Facebook/IG/Reddit/Twitter because of the algorithm.<p>Can't email more than 4 times a year due to spam filters. I still pay hundreds of dollars a year to reach people via email octopus and Amazon.... And it still goes to Gmail spam.<p>This is not the internet I grew up with.
Not at all. Any other medium would be a blog with RSS.<p>I set my email up to automatically snooze all newsletters to 8am the next day. Every morning I have a bundle. I read most of it, skip some, and then I'm done for the day.<p>The signal to noise ratio is pretty good, and more importantly its finite. I honestly can't imagine going back to scrolling newsfeeds or refreshing sites throughout the day.
I don't mind, although I don't get a lot of email. Maybe like 10 a day, and most of that is just receipts/invoices/confirmations which can be immediately archived.<p>So in fact my inbox is usually about 90% newsletters that I haven't read yet.
This is exactly what RSS feeds were for. In fact Outlook and other mail programs support RSS feeds alongside e-mail.<p>Maybe Google should have integrated Reader into Gmail instead of dropping support for it.
My inbox a good place for me to learn about the existence of a new issue of something, but a poor place to actually read said issues, to keep track of what I've read, and manage a 'library'. I want e-reader-like features:<p><pre><code> - save my place
- highlighting
- annotations
</code></pre>
Should these features be added to Gmail? I trow not. Better to have these newsletter issues converted to some appropriate format and sent to my library, along with my ebooks and saved web pages.
Depends on the type on newsletter I'd say.<p>I find a lot of newsletters now are just blog posts that yes, would be better served elsewhere (especially those with little or no web archive/presence). A lot of great writing hidden away I feel.<p>However, curated newsletters with round-ups/link lists, I feel are <i>great</i> in email. I can tag them, stick them in a folder, and peruse at my leisure. However, if you're big on RSS this too may have limited appeal.
I just stopped reading email newsletter in general. Currently sitting at 307 emails unread in the newsletters folder.<p>I have a tab folder that I launch every morning when I drink my coffee and prep for the day. It contains HN, local news, tech news, several subreddits, and YC related stuff. I wish there was a digestible way to gather my top 20 so that I don't manually go through all that information while drinking my coffee in the morning.
I found that the problem with newsletters is that there are too many too often. I discovered Mailbrew (<a href="https://mailbrew.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mailbrew.com/</a>) a while back and it solved this problem for me — together with “newsletterifying” a few of other content channels, like Twitter and HN.
myemail+newsletter@example.com<p>Filter it out so it doesn't get in the way, read them when you want to (still generally dislike newsletters in email, rss is nicer)
I get multiple newsletters in my inbox; some are daily, some weekly, some randomly.<p>It takes no time at all to scan them, decide if there is anything useful and then delete, flag to be read or "save to pocket".<p>I read the more interesting newsletters or linked articles at my leisure.<p>Works perfect for me.
Newsletters use email because it's much more likely to stay operational for longer into the future than any other random web service.<p>It's a source of power.<p>If they don't have your email, then they can't contact you in the future if the platform decides to kick them out.
I kept missing my newsletters and that annoyed me to an extent where I decided to build my own solution: <a href="https://slickinbox.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slickinbox.com/</a>, Slick Inbox provides you an email that you can use to subscribe to newsletters, and the app is built for reading newsletters.<p>There are other services out there like Stoop Inbox, Feedly & Feedbin that also does the same thing, but point being that I think newsletters are fundamentally different from an "email" and thus deserve a special treatment (similar to how Podcasts are just RSS feed underneath, but it's fundamentally a different product)
It is not you, RSS etc etc like the other comments<p>Feedly and Unread (iOS app) are my poison of choice. Lovely interface on top of a reliable service.<p>Unread also does an instapaper-like parse of the article if you subscribe to a feed that does that daft excerpt only thing :)
Email is the optimal mechanism for any newsletter I care to receive. I get it with no effort (no need to go anywhere else) and it's there in my email reader for whenever I have the time for it.
I have a mail address specifically for news letters I subscribe to, so it's like a physical mailbox with my subscription magazines dropping in every now and then. If the newsletter is worth reading, I don't mind reading it in my inbox. The problem is that most newsletters are a waste of energy and then the inbox becomes a place where the newsletters go to die. Once I notice this pattern I unsubscribe from those newsletters. This leaves me with an inbox with mostly high quality newsletters.
I've found that most places offer the same content in an RSS feed as their newsletter.
I prefer the terminal newsboat RSS reader running in Docker. :
<a href="https://newsboat.org/" rel="nofollow">https://newsboat.org/</a>
<a href="https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat</a>
...and lynx is also in the container for browsing.
My Gmail plugin is coming from the same pain (I subscribed to a ton of great newsletters, but they clutter everything human): <a href="https://www.getbreef.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.getbreef.com</a> . It's just my side project, and it's in beta - let me know if you'd like to try it.<p>It gives desktop Gmail an RSS-esque topic view of your inbox, and lets you infinite scroll through emails like you would Twitter or Insta.
Thankfully, Substack provides an RSS feed. If there's no RSS, I don't subscribe.<p>In the future I might try Kill the Newsletter as suggested in another comment.
Different media have different affordances and cultures.<p>I happen to think:<p>email is for discussion with people, and occasionally for notifications/reminders<p>chat systems are for talking in near-realtime<p>Usenet is for long slow public conversations<p>forums are like Usenet but worse for reading<p>RSS is for reading periodic content - comics, newspaper articles, magazine articles, columns, blogs<p>Newsletters are clearly periodic content, so RSS is the way.
One of the features I liked about Hey but as a broke graduate student couldn't justify that cost.<p>Easy to replicate in Gmail though: create a folder/label, filter to skip the inbox, mark as read, and go into the desired folder. Boom you have a newsfeed specific to your newsletters.
I use NetNewsWire (Mac, IOS) to subscribe to substacks RSS feeds. Free posts appear right in the app. You have to click through to read subscriber-only posts in the browser. It has several options for syncing your feeds' state between devices. (iCloud, Feedly, etc)
I actually like it. I'm in the habit of checking my email regularly, so this allows me to consume the content I subscribe to without needing to build a new habit/ritual. Not saying everyone has to do things my way, just saying why I like it.
I can give you some data from my own newsletter [1]. Newsletter supports both RSS and Pocket as alternative sources for newsletter issues.<p>~200 subscribers<p>~6% accessed their RSS URL within the last week<p><1% authenticated with Pocket<p>[1] <a href="https://funnies.page" rel="nofollow">https://funnies.page</a>
I use an email address provided by Inoreader to get all my newsletters along my RSS feeds.<p>Unfortunately some newsletters are tied to my user account and my main email address for some services, so I had to do an email forward rule in Gmail for those for them to skip my inbox.
I set up a newsletters email folder with automatic filtering. When I feel like reading newsletters, I go there. Otherwise, I don’t see them. Sort of the same behavior loop of opening up my RSS feed (which, incidentally, is how I’m seeing this post).
It's clearly not just you, based on the other comments, but I use my RSS Reader (InoReader) for quicker bits of reading/scanning/art/comics, so email works just right for me.<p>I have filters for each newsletter, so I don't actually think of it much as "email," but as "let me go check and see which newsletters have new issues to read today now that I have time for newsletter reading." Checking just now, there are 18 individual titles under my "Lists" heading in Fastmail, of which six are bold, indicating something new to read.<p>For me, sending those newsletters to RSS would be a step backward, and having to remember to go visit the websites in question would be two steps backward, so I guess I'm the target market for the status quo!
Ill take a crowded inbox over the previous system: a crowded post box. At least i can throw spam blockers and other tools at the problem. Setting roadblocks to catch postal trucks is a federal offence.
Feedly has a newsletter feature that I use for a few of my subscriptions, but yeah generally I agree. Inbox/Email is for people reaching out to me directly, not for general Internet things.
I use Hey as my main email client and make good use of its feed category, a dedicated inbox for newsletters. I wish it would offer more "reader" options, but other than that it works.<p>Works.
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
email newsletter are to me just a “blog posts with email notification”, they are difficult to filter, difficult to search and makes the inbox filled with less important stuff, i think there is a gap in the market for some sort of a solution, maybe a service that sends all your newsletters to “Notion” so you can search them ;) what do you think?
I recently switched to <a href="https://www.hey.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hey.com/</a> for email, which provides a dedicated page for reading newsletters.<p>I didn't like it at first, but after comparing in depth with Gmail and Superhuman I prefer the workflow. Having separate interfaces for communications, feeds, and automated emails has been great.