Welcome to today’s Wonder Tools post about tools for reading newsletters. I’m Jeremy — thanks for inviting me into your inbox. 💌
Newsletter subscriptions are flooding my inbox. My own fault, of course, having signed up for hundreds that sound interesting, such as…
Try Life School — Skills boiled down to 2 minutes
The Land of Random — Rediscover the random corners of the Internet
Drawing Links — A wonderful hand-drawn newsletter with short illustrated stories about writer and artist Edith Zimmerman’s life
Modern Loss — Candid conversation and resources on the long arc of grief and resilience
Snaxshot — A creative newsletter on upcoming food and beverage trends
In order not to drown my work e-mail in newsletters, I’ve been exploring inbox pruning methods.
I periodically search for “unsubscribe” in my inbox to surface newsletters for culling— no personal email uses that term so it’s easy to identify.
Alternatively you can rely on Gmail to sort newsletters automatically. I now use Superhuman for email, which also works for this.
You can set up a custom filter to set up a newsletter folder in whatever email reader you use. Here’s how to do that with Gmail.
Another solution is to move some newsletters to a dedicated space for reading. Read on for a few efficient ways to do that.
If someone forwarded this to you,👇 subscribe below.
Stoop Inbox
Listening to podcasts🎧 in your inbox would be a mess. That’s why Castro and other podcatchers are great— they streamline your shows into a neat queue.
Stoop aims for a similarly clean newsletter-reading experience in its app. It’s free on iOS and Android, with some optional paid premium features.
Substack Reader
If you subscribe to a lot of Substack newsletters — like this one—you might find it convenient to try out Substack’s free Web-based newsletter reader.
It’s a handy way to scan through recent posts from across your subscriptions to pick out what you actually want to read. You can also add RSS feeds to bring in other blogs or non-Substack newsletters. Here’s what it looks like.
Mailbrew
Mailbrew lets you customize a single daily newsletter to summarize the stuff you want to ingest. Pick your favorite newsletters, Twitter accounts, YouTubers, Reddit pages or whatever else you want to follow. (Reminds me of the old Friendfeed).
You get two weeks free, then it’s $8 a month. I tried it and found it well-designed, easy to set up and useful. But I passed on the price tag, given free alternatives & so many other paid subscriptions.
Kill the Newsletter
This service converts newsletters into an atom feed, so you can read them in a blog reader or another tool you use to read Web subscriptions, like Feedly.
Feedly
Feedly is an RSS reader, meaning you can use it to keep up with your favorite blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, Twitter accounts and more. Works on iOS, Android and the Web.
Feedly recently added a feature that allows those with paid accounts to add newsletters as well. It’s handy if you want to streamline topics you track.
Slick Inbox
Slick gives you a private email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters (like yourname@slickinbox.com). You can then read those subscriptions neatly in its app, rather than having newsletters clutter up your inbox. Slick wants to be for newsletters what Pocket is for articles or Feedly is for RSS feeds. I like the discovery section that highlights interesting reads.
Silent Inbox
This little add-on for Gmail enables you to read newsletters when you want to, not when the newsletter writers decide to send them. The service holds newsletters until a scheduled time and then delivers them in bulk so they don’t distract you at other times.
The free version lets allows you to schedule delivery at any time, once a day. In addition to automatically detected email newsletters, you can add 10 other senders to the Muted List.
With a Premium account for $17/year, you can change the frequency to twice a day or once a week. And your number of senders in the Muted List is unlimited.
Here’s my 🐦Twitter list w/ newsletter tools.
Thanks for reading! 💌 Reply to this note to share a thought or suggestion. It goes straight to my inbox, and I read every message.
Wonder Tools — Clean Up Your Newsletter Queue
Every month (every week?), I swear I will. not. sign. up. for one. more. newsletter. Sighhhh. There are so many good ones out there!