Newletters in Synced RSS feed

I use NewsBlur mostly for synching RSS across my various devices. I don’t use the web page much (but I’m really glad it’s there). I use Reeder on my Mac and Unread on iOS to actually consume most of my articles / posts. I recently discovered redirecting email newsletters to NewsBlur and I love this feature. The newsletters are in a separate section in the web view, but for some reason they do not show up in my synched RSS feed via Reeder or Unread. Is there a way to make this work? Ideally, I’d like to just have everything in one synched feed, but I could add a separate feed for newsletters if I knew how.

That’s a good question, I’m not sure why they don’t show up. They are normal feeds. On the backend NewsBlur basically republishes the email newsletters as feeds so they can be fetched like every other feed and treated the same. There’s some other differences like the feed address isn’t an .xml, but that just means other readers can’t fetch it (which makes sense, NewsBlur isn’t keeping an archive, just processing the email as it comes in and then turning it into stories).

I just tried and I can see my newsletter in Reeder, so maybe try deleting the account in Reeder and re-adding it?

Reeder crashes when I try to delete my only account. But when it relaunched after the crash my Newsletters were there. So this is apparently a Reeder bug and not a problem with Newsblur. Thanks for the response.
The Newsletter feature is a real winner in my opinion. I really like email newsletters and there is a lot of content available that’s not published in an RSS feed. It’s great to have something that puts them where they belong (to my way of thinking) and not clogging up my email inbox until I have time to digest. It’s the difference between having great content, relevant to me, available when I want it vs another thing to do cluttering up my inbox.

Thanks for a great product!

I agree, I don’t get to every newsletter, but when I have the time to read NewsBlur I’m in the same state to also read my newsletters, and having them pop up in my normal news reading has been a great improvement over reading them in email clients.

I sort of wish there was a setting to automatically set newsletters to Focus (a thumbs up), since they have a much higher signal to noise ratio.

I have this problem as well, although re-adding the account does not solve it for me. It will show newsletters in Reeder, but only after I visit NewsBlur itself in one way or another. Opening the iOS app/visiting the website will cause a refresh which then shows the Newsletters. If I then go back to Reeder, they’ll be there. But they will not display on their own no matter what I try. It feels like displaying the newsletters requires some sort of activity that is triggered by interacting with NewsBlur directly, but does not happen when using a third-party client.

After @Infoneer’s response I did a bit more checking, and it seems that I was a bit quick to cast the blame on Reeder. While troubleshooting I went to the Newsblur site to check and see if I had newsletters. When I relaunched Reeder they were they. I assumed that the relaunch did it. I did more troubleshooting today and learned that it was a refresh of the Newsblur page that caused the newsletters to show up. I use Unread on iOS and it behaves exactly the same (which makes total sense), the newsletters are not there until I refresh the Newsblur web page.

I’m seeing the same exact behavior. This makes the otherwise lovely newsletter feature not usable for me, because it doesn’t work in Reeder. Can anyone take a look? Indeed it seems like the Newsblur app does something that triggers a refresh everywhere, including Reeder.

I am confident that this is a bug in Newsblur, based on my research and comments from others.

I’m wondering if anyone is aware of a scriptable way to visit the site daily and refresh my main feed view. This seems to trigger the availability to RSS clients of the newsletters. If I could just put a quick daily refresh on a cron my problem will be dealt with until such time as the bug can be researched and fixed.

I investigated this a few weeks ago and double checked and Reeder is correctly refreshing your feeds. I have no idea why newsletters wouldn’t show up but everything else would. As I mentioned to @mgorbach over email, when this happens next, please email me (samuel@newsblur.com) and let me know and don’t load newsblur.com. I want to ensure I can see you in the logs and double check that everything that’s supposed to happen is happening.

Hi @samuelclay , I have the same issue and would be very happy to help debug - it is important to me so if i can’t get this working correctly i will likely switch to feedbin.

By the way a search of the forum suggests this has come up over several years now.

I’ll be fixing this later this week, stay tuned!

Whew, this one took a lot longer to fix than I thought but the good news is that it now works across all different platforms. So next time you load Reeder, it should have the latest counts without you having to do anything else. Thanks for your persistence!

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Thank you, great news!

Thanks for staying on it and fixing it. Sounds like it wasn’t a bug per se, more of an issue with clients not issuing a required (desired now?) call when fetching the feed.

Regardless, THANK YOU!

2 days. I haven’t hit the web page, all reads through unread on iOS. All my newsletters are present. :white_check_mark:

Thank you!

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