FeedMail Blog

Most YouTube feeds have not sent new notifications since 2023-10-02 14:20 UTC. We will be triggering a manual YouTube feeds over the next hour and all missing notifications will be sent. If you have any missing notifications after 2023-10-05 14:00 UTC please reach out to support. Update 14:00 : All updates have been sent. If you believe that you are still missing updates feel free to reach out. The rest of this post is a technical analysis of the issue. Background This was caused due to recent emergency response to YouTube WebSub notifications. The emergency response was necessary is due to the following factors. YouTube WebSub posts are not spec compliant and do not contain the required information to send notifications. Therefore FeedMail uses these notifications as a "ping" to re-fetch the feed. YouTube often sends notifications before the entries appear in the feed. The exact reason is not known but sometimes entries do not appear for up to an hour after the WebSub push.

FeedMail can now be installed as an app on your phone. The main benefit of doing so is that you can share URLs to FeedMail to quickly subscribe. If you are reading an interesting article or blog post simple share the URL to the FeedMail app to subscribe! This uses the share_target API which is currently only supported by Chromium-based browsers such as Google Chrome, Brave and Microsoft Edge (except on iOS where these browsers are based on Safari). You can still install and use FeedMail as an app on other browsers, but it will not be able to receive links for quick subscription. You can also share links to FeedMail from any app or browser no matter which browser it is installed from. Installing FeedMail To enable this share menu item you first need to install FeedMail as an app. This only needs to be done once. Open feedmail.org in a supporting browser and select "Install App" or "Add to Home Screen" from the menu. Then follow any prompts to complete installation.

As of 2023-07-26 FeedMail messages sent via AWS SES have an invalid feedmail.org DKIM signature. This may result in messages ending up in your spam folder. This is an ongoing issue and updates will be posted here as they are available. 2023-09-25 We have issue an update that should avoid SES re-formatting signed fields. This is a workaround but should result in valid signatures. Who is affected? This is unlikely to affect most of our users for the following reasons: 97% of our mail is sent by us directly, not via AWS. This mail still has a SPF-verified sending IP. However this may still affect users because spam filters may consider these messages less "good" than they would have been with a valid DKIM signature. The most notable Inbox Providers affected by this are Apple and Microsoft. FeedMail uses AWS SES for these providers as they reject all messages from our network provider. However other smaller providers may also have a portion of their messages sent via AWS SES. 

FeedMail now sets some email headers that advanced users can use to filter the messages that FeedMail sends. For example you can filter notifications in a specific category into a different folder. The headers that we set are documented in the FAQ . These headers have been being set on notifications for a few months now so you can use past messages to test your filters. If you have any questions, or would like to see other headers set to help your filtering please let us know .

In the past 48 hours Google has started delaying the delivery of some FeedMail notifications. This is currently affecting about 10% of messages to Gmail users. These notifications will be resent with a delay. We also speculate that some notifications will be marked as spam.   Update : As of 2023-05-09 this appears to be resolved. If You Are Affected If you use Gmail you may be affected by this. Notifications may be delayed or marked as spam. If your notifications are marked as spam you can create a filter to avoid this. Use "from:*@feedmail.org" as the rule and select " Never send it to Spam". If your notifications are delayed we are unaware of any action that you can take. However marking notifications that ended up in your spam folder as "Not Spam" may help avoid future delays.  It does appear that these emails are eventually being accepted but we are unsure if that means that they are actually ending up in users' mailboxes (or even their spam folder

Since its inception FeedMail has done processing on HTML content in feeds to ensure that it renders as expected in email form. At first this was fairly simple things like rewriting URLs to point to the correct location (many feeds use non-absolute URLs that won't work in email) but over time more complex transformations were added such as adding fallback content to media embeds without any. The full-text scraping feature requires even more complex processing as it requires stripping away most of the page and handling content that was designed for full-featured browsers. What changed? Recently FeedMail has migrated all HTML rewriting to use new infrastructure. This provides more flexibility and enabled new features (such as showing controls on all media embeds) and made our processing much more reliable. What does this mean to me? As a user you shouldn't see much difference. Overall the emails you receive should be better formatted but the difference will be subtle. Full-text sc

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