tl;drI’m using Kill the Newsletter! to subscribe to newsletters as RSS feeds.
Renaissance
Now that RSS feeds are in full renaissance mode (did they ever actually went bust ?), I found browsing through my NetNewsWire feeds is a more pleasant experience, in essence it’s a pull vs push model, no suggestions (social feeds), no unwanted marketing (newsletters), etc.
However some newsletters are still worth reading, so I investigated a bit and turns out there’s a service that converts newsletters to RSS feeds, Kill the Newsletter!.
Outcome
Two realizations were immediately apparent to me:
- I have regained a bit of privacy, since my email is no longer exposed to the newsletter provider.
- The newsletter can still count me as a user (kill the newsletter generates unique emails), so I’m not depriving the newsletter provider of a potential revenue stream, which is good in the grand scheme of things.
But there’s a third realization, that surfaced now that I’m using it:
The transient nature of newsletters
I don’t remember ever going back into my email to search for something that was mentioned in a newsletter 🤷♂️
That content is “on” for a week, maybe two, then it’s obsolete or forgotten.
Why would I want to keep it in my email ?
Better let it flow through the RSS reader, which is basically a data stream with no storage, and if I miss something, I’m sure I can find it somewhere else.
Epilogue
I do need to say that some newsletters could use a quick formatting pass, some of them make assumptions about background colors, text colors, justification, etc., which makes them hard to read in the RSS reader (to be fair, that happened on the mail reader too).
