
Show HN: Mailbrew – Automated Email Digests from HN, RSS, Reddit, Twitter - linuz90
https://mailbrew.com/
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drampelt
I just set up something similar for myself with Huginn [0], took a bit to
figure out how it works but I've been liking short daily summaries. This
definitely would have been faster/prettier though.

[0] [https://github.com/huginn/huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn)

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usrme
Would you perhaps share how you did it with an example? I really like the
concept of Huginn, but haven't had the inclination to play with it further
myself; setting something up for my own sources' summaries would be a good way
to start, I guess.

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drampelt
Sure. I started with Reddit, for a very basic setup you'll need:

1\. A website agent that parses the Reddit JSON api (just add .json to a
subreddit URL)

2\. A trigger agent to filter based on your criteria (ex. minimum 50 points)
and transform the JSON to a nicer message

3\. An email digest agent to bundle the messages into a single email

Each one of these feed into the next so you go from the raw JSON to a nice
email. Then you can easily just feed more things into the email digest agent
to add more to it.

Let me know if you have any other questions, my email's in my profile. It was
pretty confusing for me to get started but I'm getting the hang of it now.

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ddtaylor
I set something similar up to mail me PDFs while I am in federal prison.

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rasengan
> I set something similar up to mail me PDFs while I am in federal prison.

That's amazing. I would love to hear more.

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ddtaylor
Its basically Puppeteer for using Chrome headless to browse to sites I want,
then Readability library that Mozilla makes is used to extract text from the
page - if that fails it uses the regular page.

It does this every week and emails a PDF to a friend to send in a weekly mail
packet.

There are APIs you can use to auto upload and they will send the letter via
the post. The problem is they aren't conforming to the rules like no staples,
lots, returns, weight, etc.

There are also keyword filters and mappings to avoid some unfortunate article
like "How to Kill A..." or some other clickbait that might trigger some kind
of review. It would become "How to Hug A" and I kind of just have to keep
track of those in my head.

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rasengan
That's really impressive. Thanks for sharing!

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0xferruccio
Nice to see Mailbrew on HN. Been using it for a while to make sure I get
tweets from smart people that tweet rarely

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epsolos
Is it possible to bunch all of the newsletters into one email? I was
interested to try out about 5 of the recommended newsletters, but I'm not
exactly thrilled about 5 news emails per day/week. I have enough emails to
sift through already, and my first thought was to cancel all of the subs :/

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linuz90
Absolutely! Right now it’s a manual process though, you would need to add
sources to the one newsletter you want to keep. But we’ll make it much easier
in the future, sorry about this.

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epsolos
Thanks!

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irrationalactor
Loving Mailbrew so far, but it's too half-baked at the moment for me to be
willing to pay $10/month for it. For context, I happily pay for 1password,
fastmail, workflowy, notion, stratechery, NYT, Spotify, blackblaze, 2 VPNs and
countless other subscriptions so I am not your average cheap bastard on
reddit.

It doesn't even support producthunt, indiehackers, designer news, etc. yet.
I'd also love for the ability to scrape and detect updates to websites that
don't actually have RSS feeds (no idea how to achieve that technically, but
that is something I'd pay $10/month for).

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luke14free
Cool product, could be good for people that want to move from constantly
disturbing notifications to daily digests. What is the roadmap for supporting
more sources and for creating customized digests (i.e. create digests from
custom sources that other people can follow)?

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linuz90
Thanks. More sources and customizations are really high on our list. Long-
term, we really see this becoming some sort of knowledge/news-hub for people.

~~~
sharcerer
Hey, how do you get the top tweets? Like do you especially filter those out
based on no of likes/retweets? Also, do you have discover top threads of a
person? Though, i think top tweets would cover the first tweet of a top thread
too. Still, having thread specific feature would be nice and enticing to many
users. great work!

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buzzert
I absolutely love this idea! I've been consuming nearly all of my news out of
my inbox as of late, for a lot of the same reasons outlined in the homepage
(information dieting, "reclaiming your time", etc).

Definitely going to try it out!

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linuz90
My inbox slowly became my information hub as well, and I always defaulted to
it in the end. That's part of the reason Mailbrew was born.

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radagast
Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for to send me the X top stories from HN
everyday but $10 per month is way to much for this. $10 per year is what I
would happily pay for receiving the HN newsletter every day.

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crcl
I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the conclusion. If an
information/continuing-education tool is exactly what I'm looking for and
isn't prohibitively expensive for me, then it's worth it (note: recognizing
that I'm assuming HN is such a tool for you). At $10/month, the tool is
cheaper than what many folks pay for coffee.

Anecdotally, there are also lots of folks that say they can build something
similar without having to spend the money, but how often do they actually
build it? And how much time would they actually spend building it? If the
existing tool works the way I want/need it to, I'm more likely to gain value
by paying for that existing solution than building it myself.

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rozenmd
The tool isn't coffee though.

[https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/the-cup-of-coffee-
pricing-f...](https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/the-cup-of-coffee-pricing-
fallacy/)

~~~
crcl
Yeah, that article makes fair arguments, there are a lot of (often inaccurate)
assumptions that go into comparing subscription services to the price of
coffee.

I still think the comparison can be a useful way to measure one's own
willingness to spend money because it can highlight how the cost of something
seemingly mundane adds up. My armchair theory is that people don't always
think about their cup of coffee (or anything that, in the moment, seems like a
one-off expense) in terms of the annual cost, but they do think of
subscription services in those terms (rightly so). And contextualizing e.g.
coffee-spending in terms of annual cost can be a helpful way to determine for
oneself whether a product is worth it.

And yes, it depends on how that individual values things, and it may not be
the right comparison to make for you, but broadly, I think the exercise of
thinking about how habitual costs add up is helpful. And again yes, this
depends on the individual, maybe this is something you already do and have
been doing for a long time so isn't helpful for you.

I agree the comparison isn't accurate and should be examined in context, but I
don't think it should be avoided completely.

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leshokunin
That looks pretty sweet. I’ve noticed a few projects offering summaries
lately. Is there a Google Cloud or some other service offering summaries? I’m
curious if it’s been made simpler recently.

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frankdilo
That would be super-interesting to us, an issue we have been struggling with
is filtering/summarizing content from sources with lots of content such as RSS
for sites like The Verge.

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heavymark
Was thinking about doing this via iOS 13 Automations, but certainly something
I'll check out. I use Feedly which pulls in HN, my other many rss feeds and
even Twitter. As use RSS to fav/save the top articles each day that I read
later in Feedly Saved or Instapaper. If this service supports sending just
content from Feedly Saved and/or Instapaper that would be great.

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heavymark
Actually looks like Instapaper offers an RSS feed of latest 25 items. So once
can use Feedly to organize all RSS feeds, including pulling in from HN and
Twitter, and use the native save feature in Feedly, that can also sync to
Instapaper. And then use MailBrew to send that Instapaper feed to email, or
create an automation on iOS 13.

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vbrandl
This looks really cool, but the UI is unusable on mobile for me. The layout is
broken and therefore many texts cannot be read. I will check this out once I'm
back at my laptop.

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linuz90
Sorry about that, I thought we addressed mobile actually. What was broken
specifically?

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gczh
I'm a user of mailbrew when they launched their beta. Love how it makes all my
reddit, twitter information overload bearable.

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desireco42
Unreadit comes to mind and probably is what inspired this service. Very cool.

I didn't see anyone else mention it, so I figure I should.

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FrankHeijd
The team that is building Mailbrew has also built Unreadit.

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lnenad
Cool idea, imho a bit pricey for what it offers, I think per subscription
billing would make more sense.

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HipstaJules
Good luck folks :)

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linuz90
Thanks man!

