FeedMail Blog

On the account page you can now set a default value for Notification Body Style. This will be used for all new subscriptions.

YouTube Shorts can now be identified in YouTube RSS feeds! FeedMail will now synthesize a "Shorts" category for Shorts in YouTube feeds. Making it easier to spot YouTube Shorts notifications as well as allowing filtering both in FeedMail and your mail client. This feature is a best-effort operation and may stop working or be removed if YouTube changes their feed, starts adding categories themselves or any other change that affects this feature.

FeedMail will be undergoing database maintenance starting at 2025-03-20 22:00 UTC. This maintenance is expected to take about 30 minutes. During this time FeedMail will not send feed updates but should be mostly available for logging in and viewing your subscriptions. If complications arise, the maintenance window may last longer. This post will be updated at the start and end of the maintenance window and as needed if the expectations change. Feed updates will automatically resume when maintenance is complete. Updates 22:00 Maintenance started. 22:15 FeedMail is fully operational again. 22:24 Maintenance complete.

FeedMail now supports SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) . This standard provides receiving domains a way to attempt to indicate that incoming mail should only be delivered over a secure connection. When FeedMail receives this signal it will refuse to deliver over insecure connections (retrying mail as required). FeedMail does not currently support SMTP TLS Reporting (TLSRPT) . We will be reaching out to any existing customers who's mail may be rejected due to this change.

This change may result in increased credit usage for non-digest subscriptions. Am I Affected? Digest Subscriptions are unaffected . Owner-paid Feeds are unaffected . Frequently updating real-time subscriptions are affected . If you have questions regarding your specific subscriptions please contact FeedMail support . Background FeedMail pricing has always been 1 credit per email notification. However in practice FeedMail would charge at most 1 credit every time a feed was checked, even if there were multiple new items on that feed and multiple emails were sent. In other words FeedMail sometimes undercharged users. Going forward, this billing error will be corrected, which may result in higher credit usage for feeds that were previously undercharged. Correcting this issue is essential to preventing abuse, ensuring long-term sustainability, and maintaining fair pricing. Multiple updates are a rare occurrence. It usually happens on on feeds that update very often (faster than once every 5...

Owner-paid feeds allow feed publishers to provide FeedMail to their subscribers at no cost. For example the FeedMail Blog is an owner-paid feed. Up until now digest subscriptions were not covered by owner-paid plans. Subscribers could select a digest but they would have to pay for the subscriptions themselves. Digests are now fully supported under owner-paid plans. For users: The owner-paid feeds in your digests no longer count towards the cost of the digest. For publishers: Users will now be able to receive your feed as a digest or included in one of their existing digests. You will be charged one credit for each digest issue containing items from your feed (no matter how many items from your feed are in that issue). Notably this cost will never be more than real-time subscriptions would be.

From 2024-08-26 19:46 to 2024-08-27 11:21 UTC FeedMail had an outage. Until 2024-06-26 20:34 FeedMail was completely down. For the remainder of the outage most emails not sent. It is expected that no feed updates were lost during this outage. Updates would only be lost if they were only present on the feed within the 50min of total outage. Most feeds ensure that updates are present for days so this would not be an issue. Notifications have been delayed and should be sent by 2024-08-27 12:31. This may take longer if your mail provider applies limits and FeedMail needs to retry delivery at a later time. Update : All delayed notifications have been sent successfully. Timeline All times are in UTC . 2024-08-26 19:46 Start FeedMail goes down.   19:53 Detection Automated monitoring reported that feeds were not being checked. 20:34 The Database IP was hardcoded, restoring most functionality. 2024-08-27 11:21 Resolution FeedMail was switched external DNS. 11:24 Schedule of ...

Due to an oversight category filters did not apply to digests. This has been corrected and future digests will be filtered by your selected categories. If you do not want this filtering to occur please update your filters to "Ignore selected categories" and deselect all categories to inactivate the filter.

You can now configure your subscriptions to send in "Thumbnail Only" mode. This will include just the title and thumbnail in the body. This is especially useful for Digests where scanning thumbnails is faster than needing to skip over often uninteresting descriptions. Updates that don't have thumbnails will just show a title (like "No Content" mode). You can configure Thumbnail Only mode for any subscription on its settings page.

It is now possible to set a digest as your default subscription target. This will make new subscriptions go to the selected digest by default. To make use of this new feature simple head over to the Default Subscription Target section of the Your Account page. From there you can select a digest as the default target for new subscriptions or change the target back to any email on your account.

It was recently discovered that the FeedMail support address was rejecting messages. These support requests have not been received. This situation has now been resolved. If you require support please re-send your request . There are no currently open requests awaiting responses. Any request sent in the past has been lost. We are very sorry about this loss of support. FeedMail strives to respond to all requests within one business day. Typically we respond within a few hours. We don't know the exact time that this started, but we noticed a configuration change that affected the intended email address. It is likely that this change occurred on 2024-04-02 as some other support settings were being adjusted at that time. This would mean that for the past 6 weeks support messages were being lost. Our testing shows that users should have received a rejection message with the subject " [Rejected] " followed by the original subject. And the following body: Unfortunately, your emai...

We have recently made some small improvements to digest emails. These features will be available in future digests to all users. No action is required on your part. Digests will now contain a table-of-contents at the top of the email. This provides a short summary of what to expect and in some mail clients you will be able to click items in the table of contents to jump directly to that feed or entry. The table of contents will not be shown if all of the subscriptions in the digest have the "No Content" option enabled. Digests will now show the categories of each entry. This provides a quick overview of what to expect for each post as well as indicates how the posts can be filtered. (Click on the category chip to jump straight to the filter settings for that feed.) As always; if you have any feedback about this change or other suggestions feel free to reach out to our support team , we are always happy to chat.

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...

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.