Ever since Craigslist shuttered their RSS feeds, I’ve been looking for a alternative way to receive alerts. Earlier this week, I remembered that NewsBlur provides the ability to parse email newsletters as RSS feeds (just another amazing feature that’ll keep me paying for this service for many years to come! 
).
After setting up the basic flow (CL Saved Search > Gmail > Auto-forward to Newsblur), it mostly works! The only issue I’m facing is that the thumbnail images attached to each listing are parsed in some stories but not in others. I can’t imagine why this would happen because in both the pass/fail case, the images do appear when I open the email in Gmail, and the source formatting seems pretty much identical. Any ideas for what might be causing this issue?
Example: the following email is parsed correctly (with inline images retained):
https://www.newsblur.com/newsletters/story/8207582:84820b
Whereas this one loses its images:
https://www.newsblur.com/newsletters/story/8207582:ec6b6a
I noticed this too, and I commented on a thread back in April:
https://forum.newsblur.com/t/bgcolor-stripped-from-html-table-in-email-newsletter/8708.
A few more details in that thread, but no confirmation / resolution unfortunately.
This looks like a separate issue from the thread linked above by @greetingsearthling.
As for the newsletter, I don’t see the image urls in the source, so it’s possible they’re not being sent. But I doubt they are being stripped out, even as a figure tag.
I’ll subscribe to a craigslist ad and see what I can come up with.
Been using these alerts for over a week now. After reviewing 100+ stories, I’ve spotted a pattern that might help to diagnose the issue. Whether the images are parsed or not seems to depend on the number of list items:
- 1 or 2 items → images are never parsed
- exactly 3 items → can go either way
- 4 or more items → images always parsed
