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FeedMail vs First-Party Newsletters

Some website both have a feed and offer email subscriptions themselves. This allows you to choose between the first-party newsletter and FeedMail. There are pros and cons to both options so we have assembled a list to help you make your decision.

FeedMail Advantages

Keep Your Email Private

When you subscribe via FeedMail the website doesn't learn anything about you. This provides good privacy protection and you can rely on the FeedMail features you trust.

  • No unsolicited communication. Their only way to reach you is via the feed that you subscribed to.
  • Easy unsubscribe. Don't worry about confusing dark-patterns and dozens of "categories" that need to be unsubscribed from individually. There is also no concern that they quietly add you back to their lists in the future.
  • No data selling. FeedMail's privacy policy disallows using your data for anything but running and improving FeedMail. This means that your data stays private.

No Tracking

While feeds can contain tracking links and pixels it is incredibly rare. On the other hand it is rare to come across a newsletter without heavy tracking. This tracking is harmful to your privacy, and often even security due to insecure tracking links.

In addition to the privacy concerns newsletters with tracking are often less functional.

  • Newsletters often silently remove users who block tracking. The owners are worried that unread messages landing in the spam folder will hurt their deliverability. One of the benefits of being a paid service is that FeedMail knows that you are interested—so you can stay subscribed as long as you want, with no tracking.
  • Tracking links often expire. This means that after a couple of months all of these updates are full of broken links.

Category Filters

You often want to subscribe to just a subset of topics on the website. Many blogs have categories in their feed but no filtering options for their newsletter. FeedMail allows you to filter by category to get just what is important to you.

First-Party Newsletter Advantages

No Cost

First-party newsletters are usually paid for by the website. While FeedMail is low cost, free is always nice.

Flexible Formatting

While nothing prevents beautiful formatting in RSS Feeds it is more common to see very basic styling to avoid confusing basic Feed Readers. First-party newsletters often provide richer formatting which may provide a better reading experience.

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