How to subscribe to email newsletters via RSS

I have exactly one inbox for reading blogs and following news, and it's expressly not my e-mail client—it's my feed reader. (Looking for a recommendation? Here are some instructions on setting up NetNewsWire; for once, the best app is also the free and open source one.)

Anyway, with the rise of Substack and the trend for writers to eschew traditional web publishing in favor of e-mail newsletters, more and more publishers want to tangle their content up in your e-mail. Newsletters work because people will see them (so long as they ever check their e-mail…), whereas routinely visiting a web site requires a level of discipline that social media trained out of most people a decade ago.

But, if you're like me, and you want to reserve your e-mail for bidirectional communication with humans and prefer to read news at the time and pace of your choosing, did you know you can convert just about any e-mail newsletter into an RSS feed and follow that instead?

Many of us nerds have known about this for a while, and while various services have tried to monetize the same feature, it's hard to beat Kill the Newsletter: it doesn't require an account to set up and it's totally free.

How to convert an e-mail newsletter into a feed

Suppose you're signed up to the present author's free monthly newsletter, Searls of Wisdom, and you want to start reading it in a feed reader. (Also suppose that I do not already publish an RSS feed alternative, which I do).

Here's what you can do:

1. Visit Kill the Newsletter and enter the human-readable title you want for the newsletter. In this case you might type Searls of Wisdom and and click Create Feed.

2. This yields two generated strings: an e-mail address and a feed URL

3. Copy the e-mail address (e.g. 1234@kill-the-newsletter.com) and subscribe to the newsletter via the publisher's web site, just as you would if you were giving them your real e-mail address

4. Copy the URL (e.g. https://kill-the-newsletter.com/feeds/1234.xml) and subscribe to it in your feed reader, as if it was any normal RSS/Atom feed

5. Confirm it's working by checking the feed in your RSS reader. Because this approach simply recasts e-mails into RSS entries, the first thing you see will probably be a welcome message or a confirmation link you'll need to click to verify your subscription

6. Once it's working, if you'd previously subscribed to the newsletter with your personal e-mail address, unsubscribe from it and check it in your feed reader instead

That's it! Subscribing to a newsletter with a bogus-looking address so that a bogus-looking feeds starts spitting out articles is a little counter-intuitive, I admit, but I have faith in you.

(And remember, you don't need to do this for my newsletter, which already offers a feed you can just follow without the extra steps.)

Why is Kill the Newsletter free? How can any of this be sustainable? Nobody knows! Isn't the Internet cool?