Some people simply prefer email. If you live in your inbox and do not want another app, you can still follow sites by feed: a service checks the feed and emails you whenever something new appears.
1. A feed-to-email service
Several services do exactly this. You give them the feed address, choose between one email per post or a daily digest, and confirm your address. Blogtrottr and Feedrabbit are two long-running examples, and there are others. Free plans usually have limits on the number of feeds or on how often they check.
If the site gives you only its home page address, find the feed first; our guide on finding the feed of any website explains how.
2. Your feed reader’s email options
Some readers can send you a digest or forward items that match a rule. Inoreader, for example, can email you items that match a search, which is useful for following a topic across many sources without reading everything.
3. Do it yourself
If you run your own server, small scripts and tools can poll feeds and send email; the open-source rss2email project has done this for years. Combined with a self-hosted reader, it gives you both options from the same list.
Email or a reader?
Email works well for a handful of sites that post rarely. Beyond ten or fifteen, the inbox fills up and a reader becomes much more comfortable: everything is in one place, you can mark things as read in bulk, and nothing mixes with work email. When you get there, the list of readers we recommend is a good start.
