FeedMail Blog

FeedMail now has a dark theme. The dark theme will automatically be used if your browser indicates that you prefer dark themes. If you aren't seeing the dark theme please look up how to enable dark themes in your browser.

You can now override the titles of your subscriptions. Simply go to the subscription detail page and enter a new title in the "Override feed title" field. By default the title comes from the feeds themselves. However if the feed title isn't useful, or is just too similar to some of your other subscriptions, you can simply provide a new name. If you want to go back to the title from the feed itself simply clear the override. You will see the new title everywhere the old title was previously displayed; including the from address of notifications, your subscription list and the subscription detail page. The email address that notifications come from will not be affected.

To err is human, so we have added the ability to re-subscribe. Whether you clicked "Unsubscribe" by accident or simply changed your mind, our unsubscribe page now has an undo button. If you change your mind later you can simply go back to the subscription page and click "Re-Subscribe" at the top of the page. You can find this URL at the bottom of every email notification or in your browser history. FeedMail will remember subscriptions for up to 30 days after you unsubscribe. Past that they will be scrubbed from our database.

FeedMail supports WebSub for real-time feed updates . WebSub is a great technology that allows faster and more efficient content distribution. However WebSub hubs have the ability to inject arbitrary content into feeds. This is normally not an issue because feed owners will use hubs that they trust. The decentralized nature of WebSub even allows feed owners to run their own hub and trust no one. However if a WebSub hub is hosted over unencrypted http:// anyone who can see traffic between the subscriber (in this case FeedMail) and the hub can inject arbitrary content into the feed. We consider this too risky for too little benefit and will be removing support for this configuration. When a user sees an https:// feed they expect that it is private and secure. In order to maintain this expectation FeedMail already takes a number of precautions. https:// to http:// redirects for feeds are not followed. Feed URLs are never updated to http:// URLs. (Generally, FeedMail follows feed URL ...

Update : FeedBurner is effectively disabled and no longer supports BrowserFriendly widgets. This post is obsolete but left up for historical reference.

Executive Summary Between 2022-05-12 19:37 and 2022-05-13 12:06 UTC (a period of 16h 29min) notifications for feed updates were not delivered to most customers. These notifications were delivered between 12:16 and 12:36. No notifications were missed. Technical Details There was an attempt to enable DNSSEC for MX record lookups. However the applied configuration resulted in errors for domains without DNSSEC configured. This error was not caught during testing because it was expected that this configuration only validated for domains where it was configured and the haphazardly selected test set happened to only include validated domains. This error was not noticed until 2022-05-13 12:00. This delay was due to quota exhaustion on FeedMail's primary error monitoring service. This resulted in errors not being reported immediately. Instead they were only detected by manual polling of our error dashboard. Once the cause was identified the following actions were taken: All items in the uns...