Do these 3 things and you’ll never clog your inbox with newsletters again

Newsletters are the new blog. Most of the web’s best essays and curation have moved to the inbox, for tech and economic reasons I won’t break down here. The problem: some of us don’t like reading things in our inbox.

I, personally, like the idea of newsletters, but I don’t like mixing my list of things to read with my list of messages that need responses. It makes Inbox Zero borderline impossible to get to, and it’s also terrible if you use your inbox as a to-do list. So I’ve been working on ways to keep newsletters out of my inbox. Here’s what I found.

Use an RSS reader instead

Newsletters are arguably replacing RSS, and that makes sense—it’s a great technology that never caught on with most users. But I still love my RSS reader and will mourn Google Reader’s passing until the day I die. And there are great RSS reader apps out there that you can use to keep up with newsletters.

Substack is the fastest-growing platform for newsletters, and Substack offers RSS feeds. Just add /feed to the end of the URL for the publication (for example, https://example.substack.com/feed).

If you’re not looking at a Substack newsletter, no problem. You can easily find the RSS feed for any website, and those tips should apply to most newsletters as well, assuming the newsletters also live on a website.

If you can’t find an RSS feed, Kill the Newsletter is a free service that can turn any newsletter into a feed. The service gives you a custom email address that you can use to sign up for any newsletter, then an RSS feed that turns every email received into a post. It works well, though newsletters with a lot of formatting sometimes get messy.

Not ready to use an RSS reader? If you’re a Pocket or Instapaper user, I’d consider using Zapier’s RSS integration to automatically save newsletter articles for reading later.

Use Gmail filters

Maybe you don’t mind reading newsletters in Gmail, but you don’t want them in your actual inbox. You can automatically sort them into their own label using Gmail filters. Just set up filters for each of your newsletters, so messages skip the inbox and end up under the appropriate label.

Set up a dedicated address for newsletters

If the above tips don’t work, there’s one more thing you could try: set up a dedicated email address for newsletters. We recommend this for junk email, but it could also work for newsletters you actually want.

It’s very easy to set up a new Gmail, Outlook, or other email address. Do that, and use it to sign up for all newsletters (instead of using your actual email address). Log in to that address when you’re ready to do some reading, without seeing any emails from your boss or in-laws. I highly recommend it.

Email newsletters aren’t going away anytime soon, and there really are some wonderful ones. Don’t let your aversion to reading things in your inbox keep you from reading.

This article originally appeared on Zapier’s blog and is reprinted with permission.