Newslurp: Reading GMail newsletters in an RSS feed
Email newsletters are the future. And the present. And also, at various points, the past. They've exploded in popularity (much like podcasts), hoping that individual creators can find enough people to subscribe to keep them afloat (much like podcasts). It's an idea that can certainly work, though I doubt whether all of the newsletters out there today are going to survive, say, next year, much less in the next 5. (Much like ... well, you get it.) My inbox got to the point where I could find literally dozens of new issues on Sunday, and several more during each day of the week. They were unmanageable on their own, and they were crowding out my legitimate email.
In a perfect world, I could just subscribe to them in Feedly. I am an unabashed RSS reader, with somewhere in the vicinity of 140 active feeds. I am such a hardcore RSS addict that I subscribed to Feedly Pro lifetime somewhere in the vicinity of ... 2013, I think. Gods. It was a great deal ($99), but it means that I miss out on some of the new features, including the ability to subscribe to newsletters. There are also some services out there that seem like they do a relatively good job, but even at $5/month, that's $5 I'm not sending to a writer.
And frankly, I was pretty sure I could build it myself.
Thus was born Newslurp. It's not pretty. I will 100% admit that. The admin interface can be charitably described as "synthwave brutalist." That's because you really shouldn't spend any time there. The whole point is to set it up once and never have to touch the thing again. The interface really only exists so that you can check to see if a specific newsletter was processed.
It's not perfect. There are some newsletters that depend on a weirdly large amount of formatting, and more that have weird assumptions about background color. I've tried to fix those as I saw them, but there are a lot more mistakes out there than I could ever fix. Hopefully they include a "view in browser" link.
Setup is pretty easy.
Install dependencies using Composer
Use the SQL file in install.sql to create your database
Set up your Google API OAuth 2 Authenticaton. Download the client secret JSON file, rename it "client_secret.json" and put it in the project root
Navigate to your URL and authenticate using your credentials
Set up a filter in your Gmail account to label the emails you want to catch as "Newsletters." You can archive them, but do not delete them (the program will trash them after processing)
Visit /update once to get it started, then set up a cron to hit that URL/page however frequently you'd like
That's ... that's pretty much it, actually. It worked like a charm till I started using Hey (which has its own system for dealing with newsletters, which I also like). But it still runs for those of you out there in Google-land. Go forth and free your newsletters!
Loogit me, building the Substack app 3 years too early. And without the infrastructure. OK, I built an RSS feed. But I still saw the newsletter boom coming!