FeedMail Blog

Thanks everyone who has helped evaluate digests over the past weeks. All of the blocking issues are now resolved and we will be releasing them soon. Once digests are officially released there will be links to them from the FeedMail site and pricing information added to our homepage. Price Increase Part of the purpose of the beta was to evaluate the cost of providing digests and see how they would be used. We have decided upon final pricing which we hope will be sustainable for years to come. Digests issues will cost 1 credit per 5 feeds. Note that this is feeds included in an issue , not total feeds that target a particular digest. It also does not matter how many new items a feed has. So if you have a digest with 200 feeds configured but this morning's issue only has new items from 2 of them it will cost 1 credit. If 14 feeds update the next day that issue will cost 3 credits. If the day after has no updates it will cost nothing. This new pricing takes effect no earlier than 202

Up to this point FeedMail has only supported real-time notifications. Meaning that every feed update immediately produces a single email. However this is about to change! When we asked for feedback on the features you would like to see in FeedMail we had a number of users reach out saying that they wanted a way to batch notifications together. We saw two main reasons for this: To reduce noise in their inbox. For some high-volume feeds users wanted to be able to quickly skim, then delete the entire batch in one go. While deleting one-by-one offers more flexibility, the bulk option is easier for high-volume feeds. To reduce costs. While we believe that our prices are incredibly reasonable, they can add up if you are getting lots of updates. For example if you follow a feed that updates every 15min that will be about $35 a year (or half price if you buy your credits in bulk). Not super expensive but maybe more than you want to spend for a single feed! Digests provide and option for cost

TL;DR FeedMail will now ignore new items 7 days older than a previously seen item. This is expected to affect almost no "true" new posts. In theory checking to find new entries for a feed is a simple process. Download the feed. Check the ID of each entry to see if you have seen it before. However the real world is much messier. It is recommended for feed IDs to be URLs (to ensure global uniqueness) however this results in many feeds just using the URL that the article was posted at. However these URLs sometimes change, and poorly designed feed generators update the ID of existing entries to the new URL. From a protocol point of view these are completely new entries, however to a user these are duplicates. In order to mitigate this common issue from affecting our users FeedMail has some simple mitigations for posts that have recorded published dates. If the entry is older than a year always ignore it. If the entry is older than the 10th newest post in the feed ignore it. If th

We feel that FeedMail has the basics covered and are looking into what we can support next. We don't want to become too bloated but think there is room for a few more features! Here are some ideas that we are considering. If any of these ideas appeal to you please message support and let us know we can then prioritize the popular features.. PGP Encrypted Notifications While FeedMail requires access to the feed contents in order to check for new items, we could keep your email provider out of the loop by encrypting the subject and message body. Please also let us know how you would like to use this feature. Would you use a key per account, email address or subscription? Automatic Subscription Backups While FeedMail performs our own backups some users want control of their own data in case the worst happens. Would you be interested in getting an OPML export of your subscriptions emailed to you monthly, yearly or some other interval? Or would you like to have them backed up anoth

FeedMail is offline. This appears to be due to an outage at DigitalOcean, our primary hosting provider. Their status page says nothing is wrong but their control panel won't even load. We are trying to contact support. Updates will be posted here as they become available. All times are in UTC . Update 23:52 FeedMail appears to be back online. Feeds have been polled and updates sent. DigitalOcean is still having problems. We are monitoring the situation. Update 00:06 DigitalOcean has published an incident to track this global outage. FeedMail is not currently seeing any direct impact but DigitalOcean still says that there may be elevated error rates. https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/xkpsn9hbnnlz Update 20:57 DigitalOcean claims that they have resolved this issue and any remaining errors should still be subsiding. FeedMail is still operating normally and it seems that no further disruptions are expected. Summary FeedMail experienced two periods of downtime, from June 13th 2

FeedMail now supports feeds that are paid for by the feed owner. This means that subscribers will not have to pay. For Subscribers As the first owner-paid feed, subscribing to the FeedMail blog is now free for all FeedMail users. If you are subscribed to this blog you should now see an info box at the top of the Subscription Management page indicating that the feed is paid for. Note that this only applies to the main feed. If you are subscribed to a per-category feeds we recommend switching to the main feed and using category filters. For Feed Owners Pricing for feed-owners is the same as regular subscriptions. One credit per notification. They can purchase credits in bulk for the regular bulk discount. Setup is not yet self-service. If you would like to use FeedMail to provide email newsletters and would like to cover the costs for your users please reach out to support with the feed URLs that you would like to cover.

Did you lose your phone? You can now log out all of your active sessions by clicking "Log out all devices" on the User Preferences page. Thanks to Muhammad Zain Khan for investigating FeedMail security and highlighting the importance of this feature. More on FeedMail Sessions While we are talking about sessions here are some technical details on how sessions work on FeedMail. When you log in (or create and account) you are given a session that is valid for 14 days. If you are actively using FeedMail, this sessions is refreshed in the background, keeping expiry 13-14 days in the future. Note that sessions are only refreshed on pages where login is required, like your subscriptions or user preferences . Public pages (like our FAQ ) will not refresh your session. This means that if you occasionally add, remove and configure your subscriptions you will very rarely see a login page on your main devices while still having a fairly short session lifetime.