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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I think every email newsletter should offer an RSS feed as a matter of course. With all of ours, you just stick /rss on the end of the URL and off you go :-) e.g. https://javascriptweekly.com/rss

With that said, I think there are some interesting opportunities for turning certain types of email into RSS feeds generally. I think it'd be really cool to have all of the random and very low priority emails landing at the 101 spare domain names I have to turn up in a single feed somehow rather than be forwarded.

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Another HN today is talking about tracking pixels in newsletter mails so the sender can evaluate effectiveness.

I bet a general mail-rss bridge with many subscribers would make them sad.

In case anyone's missed it, that's this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26162513

- from the BBC article 'Spy pixels in emails have become endemic'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56071437

Don't really needs a thread, using images for email tracking is a old and well known technique, but whatever maybe there are more people that don't know that in the end

I usually put a curl for the tracking pixel in cron when the plain text version is not available

I seem to recall years ago google was looking to make that sort of thing useless because they would always download all images in an email and serve them from their cache... wonder what changed?

Google still does cache them do they not? I am pretty sure all the emailer would know is that the email got received, but I don't think they actually know if you open it. However if you click a link they would know.

FWD:Everyone also creates an Atom feed for subscribing to the uploaded emails from any user or organization.

E.g.: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/u/alex3917

Becomes:

http://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=alex3917

It’s doable already. I do this with some low priority emails and marketing newsletters—-a gmail filter sends to a custom email address of my rss reader. It’s useful for getting low priority stuff out of my inbox.

I can’t wait for someone to create an rss feed which sends an email which updates the rss feed which sends another email. Repeat ad infinitum. I wonder what would break first.

22 or so years ago I moved up from second to third line. I had just got a new home email address and for some reason forwarded home to work and work to home. At the time that was done as two separate and blissfully ignorant decisions.

The work 512Kb Kilostream line passed away peacefully sometime overnight. My home modem nearly melted but I'd exceeded my 10Mb? quota anyway (probably less.)

Apparently I was the first to do that there. GroupWise sprouted loop detection fairly soon after that event anyway and single instance storage helped keep the POAs up when reply all storms became popular.

Back in the dark ages, mail loops happened more frequently. I learned the importance of spending the money for an extra spindle for the spool partition that way.

I agree, but Bloomberg killed its RSS feeds some years ago.

I'd probably subscribe to more via RSS, but as it is it's just Matt Levine.

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