Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters? Is it just me, or do you believe your inbox is the worst place for newsletters? Any other medium would be preferable. |
Ask HN: Is it just me, or is the inbox is the worst place for newsletters? Is it just me, or do you believe your inbox is the worst place for newsletters? Any other medium would be preferable. |
I didn't like it at first, but after comparing in depth with Gmail and Superhuman I prefer the workflow. Having separate interfaces for communications, feeds, and automated emails has been great.
It gives desktop Gmail an RSS-esque topic view of your inbox, and lets you infinite scroll through emails like you would Twitter or Insta.
In the future I might try Kill the Newsletter as suggested in another comment.
I happen to think:
email is for discussion with people, and occasionally for notifications/reminders
chat systems are for talking in near-realtime
Usenet is for long slow public conversations
forums are like Usenet but worse for reading
RSS is for reading periodic content - comics, newspaper articles, magazine articles, columns, blogs
Newsletters are clearly periodic content, so RSS is the way.
Easy to replicate in Gmail though: create a folder/label, filter to skip the inbox, mark as read, and go into the desired folder. Boom you have a newsfeed specific to your newsletters.
~200 subscribers
~6% accessed their RSS URL within the last week
<1% authenticated with Pocket
Unfortunately some newsletters are tied to my user account and my main email address for some services, so I had to do an email forward rule in Gmail for those for them to skip my inbox.
I have filters for each newsletter, so I don't actually think of it much as "email," but as "let me go check and see which newsletters have new issues to read today now that I have time for newsletter reading." Checking just now, there are 18 individual titles under my "Lists" heading in Fastmail, of which six are bold, indicating something new to read.
For me, sending those newsletters to RSS would be a step backward, and having to remember to go visit the websites in question would be two steps backward, so I guess I'm the target market for the status quo!
Works.
The only issue I had once was a newsletter provider who required you to reply to an email to confirm you wanted to subscribe (which of course you can’t do as it’s only for incoming emails), but I contacted the newsletter owner and was approved manually.
- Client-side motivation : some users want to use their email as the "universal inbox". E.g. They may also send TODOs/reminders by sending emails to themselves instead of a separate app for alarms. Newsletters are just another stream of info that should conveniently go into their universal inbox.
- Publisher-side motivation: email addresses are valuable because it's important to "build an audience" outside of centralized platforms like Patreon/Youtube/TikTok. RSS doesn't solve the same problem because that's a "pull" mechanism instead of "push" like email.
If the above factors are unimportant to a particular person, then yes, the email inbox is a suboptimal communications channel for newsletters.
Every feed reading mechanism I've ever tried that was usable looked like a mail client. Feeds look like mail folders, and arriving items look like mail delivery, with UI notifications like "Foo (15)" indicating that feed Foo has 15 unread items.
The advantage over e-mail is that it is pull; you don't have an RSS identity that can be spammed. Kill a feed and it is gone.
I'm not sure along which lines the divide falls though. Younger? Less western? Less businessy? It's still possible that the people who would be interested in a newsletter are the same people who have email addresses.
I don't think that matters. Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list.
Email is not exactly push anymore, it stays on a server waiting for the user to go there look. Any of them can, and usually do, automatically pull data on a schedule and alert the user when there's something new. The biggest difference I can see is that you and the user do not have to deal with the spam-handling problems. If the newsletter is spam, that's a big win for the publisher, but if it's not, it's a loss.
I mentioned "RSS" under the bullet point of publisher motivations and RSS being "pull" matters from the publisher's perspective because they want the email addresses.
With RSS, the publisher's server logs can see users' ip addresses (when client RSS readers scan the URL) but not users' email address.
Consider a real-life example of a publisher's perspective to make this distinction clear and to understand economic limitations of RSS:
E.g. Tim Ferris has a blog website.
- https://tim.blog/ <-- main url
- https://tim.blog/feed/ <-- RSS url for the blog
- https://tim.blog/comments/feed/ <-- RSS url for blog comments
- https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/ <-- newsletter URL requires email signup
- (no newsletter RSS url) <-- newsletter has no RSS option
... and Tim Ferris will not allow a RSS url for the newsletter because building his email mailing list is the _purpose_ of his newsletter. He's willing to allow RSS readers to access the main blog but not the newsletter. This selective access is not inconsistent and it makes perfect sense if one understands the publishers' motivations.
Luckily for publishers like Tim Ferris, many users prefer their newsletters in their email inbox which aligns with publisher's preference to send them there.
(Yes to be pedantic, some hackers can fake out email newsletters by using Feedbin's email+RSS bridge mentioned in other comments but that's not relevant here because publishers don't care about the small minority doing that.)
For me my Inbox is the only place I'm guaranteed to visit regularly. If a notification is on any other platform then I might not ever know about it.
But then - you haven't really explained what you mean. Do you mean in terms of rendering? notifications, sharing?
And it depends on your relationship to email vs other platforms. Tell us more about your reasoning.
Not OP but I use Inoreader for RSS. It has push notifications in the paid version, although I don't need them, I just open Inoreader when I'm in a newsletter-reading mood.
> Tell us more about your reasoning.
The reason email does not work for me is that my email inbox is overflowing with a variety of types of communication: business emails that require a quick reply, unsolicited sales pitches, notifications from several services, personal emails. I need to go through each email rapidly and either reply immediately, snooze it for later, create an action item in the my to-do list, give a quick read and archive or just straight out archive without reading.
There's no place in this for "take 40 minutes to leisurely read this long-form email". Also the volume of communications is way to big to go through all of them and mark them for later reading. I imagine I could create rules for all the newsletters and send them straight to some folder but then the experience is just lacking compared to a dedicated RSS reader.
Anyway - I too have an overflowing inbox. I used to aim for Inbox zero but slipped and am living with it.
One discipline I do maintain though is that the Inbox should always be actionable. It's my todo list.
So - how do I handle non-actionable, non-urgent stuff?
1. If it will be urgent and actionable I snooze it. 2. If it's of interest but not urgent and has a web representation then I open a browser tab for later.
Newsletters nearly always fall into category 2. Unless I can just skim them for interesting links and archive them.
And a lot of the time I unsubscribe - as soon as I realise I don't really want to read it. I get most of my news from HN or various subreddits.
I think there's about 3 or 4 regular newsletters I tolerate. And I'm more tolerant of infrequent emails (new features for products I'm interested in etc)
I was inspired by the design of Hey email, whose designers reasoned that newsletters aren't really that important, they should just be something you scroll through and separate from other email which often needs a response.
Then I just process them together with everything else -- take a quick glance at headlines, archive if nothing interesting, keep it in my inbox if I want to read it sometime today, label it if it seems long and I want to keep it for later reading at leisure.
The last thing I want is yet another delivery mechanism I have to check.
If you have a problem with e-mail overload, it's not going to be solved by adding another information source. It's going to be solved by tackling it head-on in your e-mail, and there are lots of methods.
If you do decide to go the RSS route, I use https://www.inoreader.com and haven't found a better web-based/has a phone app one yet. The others I tried were all full of nonsense AI that kept bugging me, or weird javascripty fancy UIs that broke, or just didn't let me read inline (you had to click through to pages). Other recommendations welcome though.
My problem is companies sending important non-newsletter stuff in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from a filter point of view to their newsletter emails.
I also use ttrss's feature to republish articles via an RSS feed, plus Wallabag and it's RSS, to get bundles of long form content onto my Kindle.
My Saturday morning ritual is then to open Calibre and download the last week's worth of Matt Levine newsletters to my Kindle, which I then enjoy on my porch with a coffee.
Anyway, can't use Facebook/IG/Reddit/Twitter because of the algorithm.
Can't email more than 4 times a year due to spam filters. I still pay hundreds of dollars a year to reach people via email octopus and Amazon.... And it still goes to Gmail spam.
This is not the internet I grew up with.
I set my email up to automatically snooze all newsletters to 8am the next day. Every morning I have a bundle. I read most of it, skip some, and then I'm done for the day.
The signal to noise ratio is pretty good, and more importantly its finite. I honestly can't imagine going back to scrolling newsfeeds or refreshing sites throughout the day.
So in fact my inbox is usually about 90% newsletters that I haven't read yet.
Maybe Google should have integrated Reader into Gmail instead of dropping support for it.
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I find a lot of newsletters now are just blog posts that yes, would be better served elsewhere (especially those with little or no web archive/presence). A lot of great writing hidden away I feel.
However, curated newsletters with round-ups/link lists, I feel are great in email. I can tag them, stick them in a folder, and peruse at my leisure. However, if you're big on RSS this too may have limited appeal.
I have a tab folder that I launch every morning when I drink my coffee and prep for the day. It contains HN, local news, tech news, several subreddits, and YC related stuff. I wish there was a digestible way to gather my top 20 so that I don't manually go through all that information while drinking my coffee in the morning.
You know, it's likely most if not all of that can be fed into an RSS reader...
Filter it out so it doesn't get in the way, read them when you want to (still generally dislike newsletters in email, rss is nicer)
I used to use rss heavily, but it has been many years since I regularly checked a client. At least with email delivery I don’t miss them.
It depends, of course. Some things I appreciate having it sent daily, others I really don't. There isn't a one size fits all solution and that's not a bad thing.
It takes no time at all to scan them, decide if there is anything useful and then delete, flag to be read or "save to pocket".
I read the more interesting newsletters or linked articles at my leisure.
Works perfect for me.
It's a source of power.
If they don't have your email, then they can't contact you in the future if the platform decides to kick them out.
There are other services out there like Stoop Inbox, Feedly & Feedbin that also does the same thing, but point being that I think newsletters are fundamentally different from an "email" and thus deserve a special treatment (similar to how Podcasts are just RSS feed underneath, but it's fundamentally a different product)
Feedly and Unread (iOS app) are my poison of choice. Lovely interface on top of a reliable service.
Unread also does an instapaper-like parse of the article if you subscribe to a feed that does that daft excerpt only thing :)
What would be the point?
(What you're doing makes sense to you because of the additional steps that are enabled, like conversion into e-newspaper and whatnot. In principle, at least, a mail client could do the same thing, without requiring round trip out to RSS.)
First, at least IMO, RSS readers tend to have far better reading UX since their primary function is consumption.
Second, related to the previous, I prefer the "infinite scroll of content" UX of an RSS reader versus the typical email paradigm.
Third, it segregates the content so that my email contains those things that actually require effort to respond to, and not just content I'm consuming.
Fourth, you can blend your newsletters with other content published via RSS, creating a unified content feed of things you want to read (in my case it's a combination of newsletters, long form news articles, blog posts, etc).
Finally, again, RSS is far more convenient for converting to other formats like ePub.
Can you get some of these benefits with the right kind of email client, filters and config, etc? Probably. But, the original post was from someone saying they didn't want to use email. So this is an alternative. If you're happy using email, keep on keeping on!
I also enjoy reading Money Stuff this way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Maybe there's a webapp here...
What I'm doing is not for the feint of heart. For me it's as much for the joy of the project, though I do really like the power and customizability of the stack I've put together. I'm also a privacy wonk and I like having full control over my data, not to mention the content I'm consuming.
But yeah, I won't claim this is for everyone. But for those interested in a DIY project it's working great for me!
It seems you can either email occasionally or email weekly. The current system is not set up for monthly emails.
My content takes weeks to produce.
I'm also a bit skeptical that Gmail treats all domains equal. I imagine HBO/Joann Fabrics/etc... has a deal to spam people, where I do not.
90% of the spam that escapes my spam folder is web design pitches from email addresses of the format firstnamelastname123@gmail.com - always GMail...
I do wish Google provided a standalone unsubscribe link. Or maybe companies shouldn't hide it in the fine print and make me fill out a form and survey. The bad apples ruin the bunch.
Spamming Stores <spammingstores@e.spamming.com> Unsubscribe
Do you mind me asking roughly how old you are? I would like to test my theory that email is generational and it's only the over-(insert number here) that still use it as it was originally intended.
Nope! I may be cheating somewhat as I'm not counting work communication here, which does involve a decent amount of email, but I only access that inbox through a web browser so I can easily close the tab and be done for the day. I'm also not getting any newsletters to my work inbox.
> Do you mind me asking roughly how old you are? I would like to test my theory that email is generational and it's only the over-(insert number here) that still use it as it was originally intended
I'm 28. All my communication is via messaging apps (iMessage for family as we all have iPhones; WhatsApp for almost everyone else), so I suspect your theory is probably right!
I get a lot more email though. I think it's more correlated with complexity of your life. Meaning, I started getting more email when I owned a home vs renting, then more again when I got married, then more again when I had a dog, then more again when I had a kid, I'm sure as my kid ages into more activities the email volume will increase further. Also, my "personal business" generates a fair amount of comms. Like hiring contractors, getting bids on things, basically anything I pay for that is not a retail purchase requires some email traffic. But people like my housekeeper, pool guy, and lawn guy I can text them for anything I need to have them look at. It's better that way since they don't work at a desk.
Thanks for introducing a very good tool!
[1]: https://fs.blog/
Also, I find it healthy to keep things I *have* to process (email, to-do lists) separate from things that I scan for interesting stuff when I have a moment to spare (RSS, Twitter, HN, Instapaper).
> I think there's about 3 or 4 regular newsletters I tolerate.
Maybe you'd be willing to tolerate more if you kept them out of your inbox ;)
It’s impossible to communicate with their support about it anyway
I find the problem with messaging services is that there's no central inbox and no decent handling of "unread".
If I get an instant message from someone that I can't (or choose not to) respond to immediately, then the chances are very high that I'll forget to respond.
But with email it stays in my inbox and I can easily set it back to "unread" for extra emphasis.
I find I'm terrible at keeping up with messaging unless it's synchronous chatting. Anything asynchronous goes out the window.
I suppose I just find everything else lacking in features that I've come to depend on in email. I just don't understand how everyone else manages.
The rest (and indeed the vast majority) of my communication is via group chats, which I personally find messaging apps to handle much better than email clients. It also doesn’t really matter if you miss something, as there’s generally enough messages going back and forth that you will see something else and then remember to go back and check the thing you missed (if you even need to).
I will concede though, finding a particular instant message is a damned nightmare compared to finding an email.
if 0.999... = 1, then 99.999...% also equals 100%