Originally published at: Comparing Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, and Follow.it for Receiving RSS Feeds in Email - TidBITS
For those who prefer to receive their news and information in email, an RSS-to-email service lets you follow blogs, newsletters, and other services that publish RSS feeds without using a newsreader app. Adam Engst compares Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, and Follow.it.
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Thanks for the article. My interest has been in going the other way and subscribing to email newsletters via RSS! I’ve finally found feedyour.email which can turn any email newsletter into an RSS feed. I hope this helps anyone else here who’s trying to do the same thing.
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Yes. Kill the Newsletter! is another one of these that does a similar thing. Apparently, people choose RSS over email when given a choice, for some reason.
I am impressed, and pleased, that these RSS-to-email services exist, though. One would certainly have thought that in today’s disposable information overload culture, reading RSS (or just news, more generally) in a dedicated reader was more convenient—that’s certainly where the ecosystem of tools is, ironically making it a serious contender for your attention to the social media that it challenges. I now have 200+ feeds and, perhaps inevitably, use a dedicated reader, (lire) myself, sorting and prioritising feeds and automatically rendering truncated articles, in order to deal with the volume. But email is very close to my heart, and in the past I have used rss2email to do a similar thing to these services, and essentially for the same reason, that email is my kingdom too, and will probably always remain that way (I suck NNTP through a news-email gateway, too). Perhaps I will go back to it some day, if I ever decide to prune or manage my subscriptions, or set up much more aggressive filtering of my emails server-side. Email is powerful, with the right tools, provides completely standards-compliant support for syncing across multiple platforms, and there’s really no good reason everything shouldn’t be in there.
Great article!
It looks as though your first Feedrabbit link actually points to a Reddit discussion of RSS to email services, though. That discussion mentions some additional alternatives; I’m checking out feedmail right now; it looks pretty bare-bones but that appeals to my aesthetic.
I’m a big fan of RSS and have been for many years, but I know it’s not for everyone and I do get people asking how they can follow one of my web properties without setting up an RSS reader. Now I can point them to your article. Thanks!
Drat! I wonder if I’m losing the occasional copy keystroke such that my clipboard doesn’t contain what I think it contains when I paste a URL. Thanks for the heads-up—now fixed.
I only ran across feedmail the other day, and while it looked like it might work well, I didn’t want to delay the article longer. Plus, I found its costs a little hard to predict given the credit system, but now that I look more closely, since 10,000 posts would cost only $10, it’s not a problem. I’m giving it a try with Howard Oakley’s blog and let us know how it works for you.
I signed up for FeedMail and subscribed to one of my sites (twoprops.net). It works as advertised, though the email doesn’t include images, just the alt text. That might be due to a configuration issue with FeedMail or be something about the way I generate the RSS feed for twoprops, but I suspect it just doesn’t include images. Depending on the site you’re following, that might be fine, but it will mean a click to open the post in a web browser. I could see where that would make it much less useful for some folks.
I’m packing for a move to the Hawaiian Islands right now, so I don’t have time to pursue the details nor to compare it with FeedMail to Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit, or Follow.it. I’ll try to do that once I’ve landed, but my life is likely to be chaotic for some time yet.
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I looked for something like this when Apple Mail stopped supporting RSS natively, and couldn’t find anything worthwhile. I guess I should try again.
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Such a wonderful feature, and strikingly unconventional too. Such a shame Apple dropped it. I think this was also something Thunderbird could do too, at some point.
Whoa, yes, Thunderbird apparently still has an integrated RSS reader:
I use Thunderbird as my daily driver email client and had no idea I could use it as an RSS reader.
Thanks!
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FWIW, I’ve always chosen to use web-based RSS readers (my preference is currently Feedly). This is because I follow a lot of feeds, generating several hundred messages per day.
Since I don’t want to leave the app running 24x7, I think it is very likely that I’ll end up losing content. Some feeds are busy enough that an article can appear in the feed and be pushed off the bottom in a few hours. But the web-based service will log and retain it. Its archive goes very far back - I’ve scrolled back over a year for some feeds.
It also means I can read the feeds from any of my devices without needing to explicitly sync anything.
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Yes, I was going to mention Thunderbird. I use it for a few feeds, and it works quite well. The feeds are in their own folders, not in your regular inbox, but I do a ton of filtering into folders anyway so that’s exactly how I work already.
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Thanks for the article. I subscribe to 1440, and get most of my other news from the Reuters and AP apps or sites, as they seem the most neutral, but I’m interested in exploring an RSS option.
Now my question (a pretty ignorant one—my apologies): Regarding the first sentence of the article, HOW exactly do people get news on Facebook? I see references to that all the time, but I don’t understand the logistics of it. I’ve not used Facebook in a long time, but isn’t it basically just a feed of posts from people you’re friends with? Other than just random mentions of occurrences or political rants, how do people “read” the news there?
I asked my wife, an avid Facebook user, this question awhile back, but she gave only a vague answer something along the lines of “Oh, they just look around.” Lol. Can anyone explain it to me?
Awesome! Glad to hear that it’s still an option.
It looks as though there’s still no sync, but if you’re OK with that, then it definitely seems credible, specially if you also use it as your mailer. Looking at the comments on that blog, ironically the very first post mentions RSS-email services as a potential workaround to syncing your articles; moreover, it looks like there’s interest in syncing subscriptions with an external feed-aggregating service. On which …
This is all fair, and honestly, even if the only thing these services provided was sync and aggregation (remote fetches, always-on and robust) I would consider them. But, there’s the privacy angle. I would really rather not give away all my reading habits, just for that convenience. There are self-hostable options such as FreshRSS and Miniflux, but these aren’t without their maintenance burdens, as ever with self-hosted web-apps. The interfaces of these things isn’t usually my cup of tea, either—I’d rather use a third-party client (like the aforementioned lire) to sync with them. The best part about doing that is that you’re using a single connection to the sync service, which is much more efficient than trying to fetch feeds directly through the network on every device, especially mobile ones where efficiency really matters. But sure, I really ought to consider one of these, if nothing else to make managing my subscriptions easier.
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As an unrepentant news consumer, I found this piece tremendously helpful. Prompted me to give Feedrabbit a fresh look. Thanks (again), Adam!
But, as far as news grazing goes, I still really miss Zite (and then Nuzzel).
Any apps stepped up to fill that gap?
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