Rourke on Technology

Below is a brief roundup of the leading six feed to email services. This is a rapidly changing space; two years ago there were no feed to email services, nine months ago there were over a dozen, and today there are six meaningful services.

I found an interesting Alexa graph comparing web traffic for the top five services — Feedburner isn’t isn’t in this chart because the majority of traffic to Feedburner’s website is related to their feed syndication service. The Alexa chart should be a reasonable indicator of market share for these providers.

Everyone knows Feedburner, the new service that created a new category of service. Not too long ago, Feedburner started providing feed to email service only as part of their feed syndication service. If you’ve already “burned” your feed then it’s very easy to add email subscription capability. Everything is done very well, and this service has all the features a publisher would want: good scriptlet and subscription interface, subscribers counted in Feedburner subscriber stats, and control over the subscriber list. For the subscriber, the messages are full-text, clean and easy to read, and the from and subject fields look pretty nice (from is blog name, and subject is “the latest from <blogname>”). Posts are not real time — they seem to go out once a day and multiple posts from the same day end up in the same email. This service is 100% free.

If I were not already a Feedburner user, I would not sign up just for the email publication capability. However, I am a Feedburner user and this is the service I use to email-enable my blog. Feedburner is so good at doing so many things that I would advise you to take a look at this service before moving on and looking at the alternatives.

FeedBlitz is the first major provider of this service (bloglet has expired) and is clearly the most popular according to the Alexa numbers linked above. As a publisher using FeedBlitz you have all the same features you’d have with FeedBurner, but with a less clean message template (changeable if you’re willing to pay) and with another service provider to keep track of even if you already syndicate through Feedburner. Service is tiered; with a free account you get no customization and your messages will be sent out to users once a day. If you chose to pay for the “turbo” features you get real-time generation of messages (they even accept pings), customized subject and field (otherwise the sender is “FeedBlitz”), and a completely customizable email template. There’s also some nice reporting for publishers.

For subscribers looking for a feed to email service, FeedBlitz is the only provider that sends all of your feed items out as once daily digest. Quite a few people complain about the single digest approach, but this is both a limitation and a truly unique feature. No other service can be configured to create these digests. For someone who doesn’t want a feed reader but doesn’t want a pile of individual email items filling up their inbox, this could very well be a helpful feature.

For subscribers looking to use FeedBlitz to power a good number of feeds, FeedBlitz is a feature-rich feed subscription service offering OPML import/export, the ability to pause and “diagnose” feeds, and more. FeedBlitz also offers “Feed Advisor,” a feature meant to point you towards other feeds you might find interesting based on the activity of the user community. Feed Advisor, unfortunately, means more junk the messages you receive if you’re a for-free users.

I find Squeet very similar to FeedBlitz — different when it comes to the details, but overall: unique interface, good publisher features, reporting, import and export of OPML, and a Feedburner partner.

Unlike FeedBlitz, Squeet is 100% free. Publishers can not chose to customize the email that gets sent out. While there is quite a bit of support for reporting, the publish end of Squeet is a bit weaker than that of FeedBlitz. I don’t see any reason a publisher would choose Squeet over FeedBlitz.

On the other hand, the “Squeet Reader” is quite powerful and has obvious advantages over Squeet for all but users who want a digest combining all blog posts from a day into one big email. Subscribers can chose how often they want to receive messages for a given feed — from whenever there’s a change to once a day. If you chose once a day, Squeet will “digest” all the messages for that feed, but will not combine multiple feeds into the same email messages. The interface for managing your Feeds is quite nice, with some pretty usable AJAX’y stuff. The only downside to using the “Squeet Reader” is the message format — all messages arrive in a very busy HTML format with extra junk to support Squeet’s “Feed Advisor”-like feature.

Zookoda does not belong in this review. This company clearly falls into a different category — they have no functionality for the reader at all, and on the publication side they are best described as an RSS enabled email newsletter / marketing application. If you’re interested in sending out email newsletters that include information that can be gathered from RSS feeds, take a look.

Rssfwd would be my choice if I were going to subscribe to a couple of feeds via email. This service publishes new posts to a feed as individual messages using the cleanest email message format of any service out there (from is the blog name and subject is the name of the post). Rssfwd even sends the email as both HTML and plain text so it can be easily consumed via blackberry or other mobile device. The plain text email is well done, with annotations for all links.

Why wouldn’t I subscribe to a whole list of feeds with rssfwd? There’s no OPML import or export, so you can’t easily move a list of subscriptions onto or off of the service. There’s no control panel that can be used to manage your subscriptions, either — you unsubscribe by clicking a link in an email generated for a given feed by rssfwd.

It’s worth mentioning that rssfwd is open source and written in Ruby on Rails. If you’re adding rss to email functionality to your Ruby on Rails application you might want to look at rssfwd.

R-Mail really managed to rub me the wrong way — the front page has ads all over it, the signup confirmation message was blocked by my spam filter because of an improper HELO, the emails used to have Amazon ad-footers (now they contain feed recommendations), and the R-Mail blog contains entries directly bashing the competition. All that aside, this service is very similar to rssfwd in that it provides RSS users with an easy way to receive a feed via email. The email messages are nearly as clean as those generated by rssfwd (they add the word R-Mail to the subject and don’t have as nice an all text version) and, similar to rssfwd, there’s no fancy web interface and no publisher features but unlike rssfwd, R-Mail does offer OPML export. Further, R-Mail is a Feedburner partner, is aggressively adding features, and seems to be growing very rapidly. Today I prefer rssfwd, but R-Mail is worth watching.

Both R-Mail and rssfwd include examples of how a publisher could add a “subscribe now” widget to their web page. Rssfwd also has a bookmarklet for subscribing to feeds, but its not as friendly as it could be.

What about all the the Rest? Queoo appears to be an eternal work in progress with nothing functioning properly. Various reviews out there name Yutter a great service and a real up-an comer in this space, however Yutter seems to have failed already. Today the front page of Yutter is a full-page ad and there’s a note saying that it will be a different ad each month. Mailfeed has also vanished. QuickThreads is a subscriber focused service that has ugly feed messages, only allows four subscriptions for free, and doesn’t publish complete articles.

Summary: If you’re a publisher and want to give your subscribers an easy way to receive your content via email, use the Feedburner email publication option. If you’re an RSS user and you want to receive just a few feeds via email then look to rssfwd. If you’re an RSS subscriber and you plan to use one of these services as your primary way of reading feeds, Squeet is your best bet.