Feature Request: Support Email Lists

[billmei]

The most interesting people I follow share their content solely on personal email lists. In addition, many blogs these days also have unfortunately dropped support for RSS and can only be followed by subscribing to an email list. I'd love to be able to import these into fraidycat to have all of it in one place to be read later, instead of having them mixed with normal emails that require action. This could potentially be accomplished by letting the user generate their own unique email with a delimiter such as . in something like my-username.name-of-the-blog@fraidyc.at for ingestion.

A workaround I am currently using is Kill The Newsletter, but it isn't 100% reliable and the parser frequently mangles HTML emails so as to make them unreadable. This suggests that the most difficult part of implementing this feature will be creating a reasonable email parser that doesn't destroy emails that are structured unintuitively (e.g. using <table>s).

Anyway, just an idea for something I thought would be useful, maybe you would find it useful too. Thanks for building a tool to empower the social internet!

[kickscondor]

Thank you for this detailed request! I definitely would like to support mailing lists - however, keep in mind that Fraidycat has no server. So I cannot offer email addresses. It is designed to run in your browser or computer - this is great because if I fail to keep things going for some reason, you still have a working program and all of your data.

I do support some email newsletters. (For example, https://nayafia.substack.com/ works for me.) So one solution is to pressure newsletters to have RSS feeds. This approach benefits everyone.

I am definitely willing to scrape email archives. I plan to support Tiny Letter, for instance. If you want to supply some links to some different email newsletter pages, I can investigate further.

I think this could also be a separate project: an email service that publishes its inbox to RSS.

[jborichevskiy]

+1 for the suggestion; this was the first thing that occurred to me as well. Many email lists are moving to Substack but quite a few of the ones I follow are still purely Mailchimp/self-hosted/etc sometimes with their own payment configurations.

And as stupid as it is, I compulsively check the Updates tab on my Gmail accounts to keep myself from missing posts I care about from people I follow. Sometimes they end up in Promotions; other times elsewhere. It's basically a crapshoot.

I think this could also be a separate project: an email service that publishes its inbox to RSS

Agreed though, this feels like the best catch-all solution here.

[kickscondor]

After some study, here's another option: Notifier - gives you a custom email address that publishes to RSS. You could use different email addresses for different newsletters.