A minimalistic cat-like app that delivers a digest of your RSS feeds as templated newsletter.

How it works? Simple! Every day at 11 am (or at time of your choosing) letter runs on the server via cron and fetches all your precious RSS feeds to check whether there is anything new from yesterday. After some mapping and rendering newsletter digest is created and sent via e-mail. All in a catsy manner. And right into your inbox.

Use this Letter Template

to have your own daily readings delivered with Letter

Quick Howto

1. Click Use this template button above and create your repo from this template

2. Create secret variables in your newly created repository with keys as seen below

3. Fill up your favorite feeds either in plain feeds.txt file or via feeds.opml (OPML file can be exported from most rss services)

4. (optionally) Change cron time settings in letter.yml to your liking. By default letter will deliver your readings everyday at 11am UTC. You can also check if everything works as you want by triggering Github workflow via provided manual-trigger.yml.

Letter environment variables

Below Github Secrets are required for running Letter

LETTER_FEEDS=plain # plain or opml (default is plain)

MAIL_TO=dailyread@example.com
MAIL_FROM=Letter <letter@example.com>

SMTP_HOST=smtp.gmail.com # or whatever mail service you use
SMTP_PORT=465 # or some other
SMTP_SECURE=true # in most cases set this to true if you are connecting to port 465

SMTP_USERNAME=username
SMTP_PASSWORD=password

Email newsletter template

Letter uses Handlebars with html extension as default templating engine. Email is generated from letter template inside emails directory. You can make it your own as you please. Templating assumes the structure of html, subject and text html files. Here's how letter template looks by default:

Notes

OPML file structure can be flat or nested

Sometimes certain services like i.e Feedly, export OPML feeds in a nested manner. Letter supports both flat and categorized notations. Even in the same file. Please see feeds.opml.example

Gmail considerations

If you use Gmail for sending out the newsletter and your account has Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled you need to generate app-specific password which then can be used in place of your regular SMTP_PASSWORD variable in .env file.

License

Meow-what ? Cats don't need no stinking licenses. Just be good and state the source of the original cat [wink].

Cats and credits

I have tried hard to find original authors of cat gif and cat avatar used in the template and header. Long time ago i found those chucklesome pics sitting in my old computer folder one day and they sparked me to make this simple why-not weekend project. Funny enough i found myself using it for this day (What can i say - i just love my RSS readings delivered as email - i'm weird that way) Aaanywho - if you are the original author of any of these lovely cats, please let me know so i could give credit where credit is due.