Where have you been?

I have never particularly cared for newsletters. A really long wall of text which is more of a rehash/digest and arrives in your inbox with all kinds of html formatting that I have to view as an attachment but would have better served as a blog post? Let's face it. Email clients are shitty for the most part. And then to be forced to spend time reading newsletters in there among all of the usual worthless spammy emails? Sorry, got no time for that.

As much as I am averse to clutter my inbox with newsletters, it occurs to me that my official email is now only used for official announcements and emails from customers. Calendar invites, GitHub alerts, Spam emails are the other categories I don't really need to look out for. 99% of our work is over Slack and Google Meet. On the personal front too, the useful stuff is barely 1%. Just like snail mails. Nobody likes to keep in touch over email either when you are not on WhatsApp. I digress but... our email inbox has somehow become perfect for newsletters whether we wanted it to or not and the email clients aren't best suited for it.

Even so I started subscribing to The Marginalian newsletter last year. Then about two weeks back, The Verge launched their newsletter Installer and that's how I learned about a third party service to convert newsletters into RSS - Kill the newsletter. The idea that newsletters can be converted into RSS feeds and then subscribed to was news for me. The Installer also listed couple of read it later apps, that can subscribe to newsletters, out of which I liked Omnivore the best and have been using it over this past week. Its not perfect but it gets the job done as a read it later app and is perfect for subscribing to newsletters. Not sure how long my newsletter experiments are gonna continue but the reaction I had on learning about these apps is exactly how Martin Short reacted to Meryl Streep in season 3 of Only Murders in the Building "Where have you been?".