I am looking for a RSS reader to start using. The big names seem to all have subscription services and that is just too much for me.

Are you using an RSS reader (or alternative) and if so, which one can’t you live without?

  • kevincox
    6·
    2 years ago

    I take a slightly different approach to RSS that probably doesn’t work well for everyone but is perfect for me.

    I get all of my RSS delivered via email by rss-to-email services. I then use filters to sort these updates into dedicated folders. So for example most of the updates go to “News” some feeds go to “Videos” and so on. I even have a few feeds that go directly to my inbox when I want to know about them right away.

    The main benefits are:

    1. I already have email clients that I like and am used to.
    2. Feeds and read/unread state are already synced across all of my devices.
    3. My email has powerful filters available which allows me to further organize.

    The main downside is that I haven’t found an email client that pre-downloads images whereas this is a fairly common feature of dedicated readers. But this is a very minor issue for me. (Maybe I’ll send a patch to K9 some day)

    I’ve been using this approach for almost a decade and am super happy with it. In fact I created my own rss-to-email service (FeedMail) in the past year to get exactly the behaviour I wanted. It is a paid service (but really cheap) but there are also ad supported options like Blogtrottr (I used their paid plan until I created my own service).