Tidy Your Email Inbox with Help from RSS
Whever I get a mass email I try to make a decision about whether I really need to be on the subscription list that sent it to me. If I can I hunt for the unsubscribe link to make sure I don’t receive more emails from that sender.
Sometimes though, I want to continue to see the information provided but don’t want it clogging up my inbox, especially for email subscriptions that have a high frequency. Since these emails are almost never urgent or very time sensitive I want to read them on my schedule, not whenever they hit my inbox.
RSS to the rescue!
I recently discovered that most group emails have a link at the top that says something like “view this email in your browser”. I always assumed this was just to accommodate email clients that couldn’t view the message correctly and so ignored the link, but a few weeks ago I clicked on it. The result wasn’t very surprising: I got to a web page that looked exactly like the email message. There was one difference though. The web page contained an RSS link. Turns out that many email campaign platforms include the ability to create an RSS feed of an emails sent. So I copied the URL from that link into my feed reader and unsubscribed from the emails themselves. Then I did the same for a bunch of other email groups emails I receive.
Now I read subscribed email messages when I want to, all grouped together. Not a huge load off my email inbox, but every little bit counts.