Guide - updated
You are not meant to read every newsletter in full. Keep the ones you open most weeks, move them out of your personal inbox, read the summary of each one first, and open in full only the few worth your time that day. Readbase does the last two for you: newsletters get their own address and arrive with an AI summary, so the pile you feel guilty about becomes a list you can get through in minutes.
Get your newsletter addressUnread at the end of each day
Read every one in full
8 minutes each, so you finish about 2 a day
By Sunday, 28 unread, and Monday brings 6 more.
Skim the summaries first
6 summaries, then the best one in full: 11 minutes
Nothing carries over to tomorrow
By Sunday, nothing waiting. You read the best 7 in full, and know what the rest said.
Newsletters arrive at the pace writers publish, not the pace you read. Six a day at eight minutes each is almost an hour of reading, every day. Most people have fifteen minutes.
Read them in full, one by one, and whatever you do not finish carries over to tomorrow, when six more arrive. That is the pile.
A newsletter you have not opened in three weeks is not one you are about to start reading. Unsubscribe from it. You can always sign up again.
Be honest about the ones you keep for who you would like to be. If it has sat unread for a month, it is not making you better informed, just making you feel behind.
Gmail lists every newsletter sender on one page, with an Unsubscribe button next to each.
In your personal inbox, every unread newsletter sits next to mail that needs a reply, and both start to feel like work.
Give newsletters an address of their own and that stops. Your inbox goes back to being for people, and the newsletters wait in their own place until you sit down to read.
A Gmail plus address, a second account, or a newsletter app with its own address.
Most newsletters are worth knowing about but not worth reading word for word. A summary tells you what each one says in a few lines, and often that is all you needed. For the rest, it tells you which one deserves your fifteen minutes today.
Readbase writes that summary for every newsletter as it arrives, on the free plan. Skim the list, open the one or two that earn it, and the rest are done, not waiting.
Pick a time that already exists in your day, like breakfast or the commute, and turn off notifications for new newsletters, so they wait for you instead of interrupting you.
The short answers are here. Ask anything else at the bottom, and we answer it from what is on this site.
More than you open most weeks. The number matters less than the gap: if you open five of thirty, the other twenty-five are only there to make you feel behind.
No. Most newsletters are written to be skimmed, and reading the summary first is what lets you keep up with them at all. You still read in full the ones that deserve it.
If the summary told you what you needed, yes. Clearing them is the point. In Readbase on iPhone you can say "Mark everything from TLDR as read in Readbase" to clear a whole subscription at once.
Start with the ones people you trust forward to you. Readbase also keeps a directory of newsletters sorted by topic at readbase.io/newsletters, and suggests some when you sign up.
A private address for your newsletters and a summary on every one, on the free plan.
No card required.
