FeedMail Blog

FeedMail was offline for 26 minutes. During this period the website was unavailable and feed updates were not sent. This outage was caused by our CoreDNS resolver failing. While FeedMail continued operating normally for a while as most operations such as feed fetching and mail sending don't rely on the Kubernetes DNS server FeedMail does use the Kubernetes DNS server for a few operations such as connecting to it's own database. When database connections needed to be refreshed the DNS resolution failure caused FeedMail to become unhealthy and it was unable to continue operation. Timeline All times are in UTC . 13:28 Start FeedMail goes down. Website is offline and feeds are not being checked. 13:32 Detection Automated monitoring reported that the FeedMail website was unavailable. 13:38 Automated monitoring reported that feeds were not being fetched. 13:42 Kubernetes cluster update was started. 13:53 Mitigated FeedMail was restored to operation. The website was ag

FeedMail now has some options for bulk editing. You can edit the following attributes of multiple subscriptions at the same time: Target (which email or digest the subscription notifies). Notification body (feed content, scraped full-text or no content). We hope this is helpful, especially for users moving between email addresses or moving lots of subscriptions to digests.

Previously FeedMail provided two options for notification bodies: Content from the feed. Attempt to scrape content from the linked website. A third option is now available which includes no content in notifications. This can be useful to reduce email size or if you prefer reading articles in your browser anyways. This option especially useful for digests. By setting subscriptions in a digest to "No Content" you can get a headlines-only digest. Or you can keep content for some short content like micro blogging but just get headlines for news sources with longer articles. Simply go to your subscription management page to change this setting. You can find a link at the bottom of each email notification.

Hi, It's Kevin, the founder of FeedMail. Wow, time really flies. I missed FeedMail's birthday by a couple of days. On November 2nd 2021 I announced FeedMail publicly . At the beginning I was going to make FeedMail just for myself. An RSS-to-email service that fit my needs. However I also wanted a way to provide email-subscriptions to my blog. I decided to roll these together and make FeedMail publicly available. This necessitated some extra features such as signup and billing but I think it was the right choice. One year later I'm pretty happy with what FeedMail has become. Features I feel that FeedMail has all of the core features it needs. There are a few customer requests and some UX improvements in the queue but it seems that we now cover most features that someone would want out of a RSS-to-email service. The last big feature was releasing digests two months ago and with that our the door we are don't have any other major changes on the roadmap. Of course if were

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 is available 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 reduce the effect of this common issue on our 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.