DEV Community: Weekly Brief (boseclaw)

How to Forward Your Newsletters to Readwise Reader (and Stop Reading Them in Gmail)

Weekly Brief (boseclaw) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:23:43 +0000

You subscribed to newsletters because you wanted to read them. Then they landed in Gmail, between a password reset and a calendar invite, and reading stopped being the point. Surviving the inbox became the point.

Readwise Reader fixes the environment problem. It is a read-later app with a proper feed, highlighting, and offline sync. The setup below gets every newsletter you care about flowing into it automatically. Everything in the first four sections works with no product of mine involved; there is a disclosed plug at the end.

Step 1: Find your two Reader addresses

Every Reader account comes with two custom email addresses, not one:

an address ending in @library.readwise.io
an address ending in @feed.readwise.io

Mail sent to the library address lands in your Library, the place for things you have committed to reading. Mail to the feed address lands in your Feed, the triage stream you skim and pick from. Readwise recommends the feed address for newsletter subscriptions and forwarding rules, and the library address for one-off documents. That split is worth respecting. A newsletter is a candidate, not a commitment.

To find both addresses in the web app, click the + button in the bottom left and choose "More import options". On mobile they are listed under Settings.

You can also rename them ("Personalize email addresses" on the Add to Library page) if the random string bothers you. Two caveats from Readwise's own docs: a guessable address can attract spam, and if you personalize a second time, the previous personalized address goes dead.

Step 2: New subscriptions go straight to Reader

From now on, when you subscribe to a newsletter, put your feed address in the signup box. No forwarding, no filters. The issue arrives in your Feed and never touches your inbox.

Two mechanical notes:

There is no allowlist to manage. Anything sent to the address gets in, which is the opposite of the Kindle personal-documents dance.
If a newsletter uses double opt-in, the confirmation email shows up in your Feed like any other document. Open it and click the confirm link. If Reader's clean text view has stripped the link, switch to original view (the document icon, top left on web) and click it there.

Step 3: Auto-forward the subscriptions you already have

Re-subscribing to fifteen existing newsletters is tedious. Gmail forwarding handles them in one sitting.

In Gmail: Settings, "See all settings", "Forwarding and POP/IMAP", "Add a forwarding address". Paste your feed address.
Gmail wants proof you own that address. Readwise handles this well: Reader confirms the verification link automatically on its side, and if Gmail asks for a numeric code instead, Reader emails that code back to your Gmail address. You just type it in. This is documented behavior, not luck.
Do not enable global forwarding. Instead, create one filter per newsletter sender: search from:thesender.com, click "Create filter", check "Forward it to" with your feed address, and check "Skip the Inbox".

Per-sender filters take a few minutes but fail safely. A broad catch-all filter will eventually forward a receipt or a security alert somewhere it does not belong.

Step 4: The cleanest fix, one newsletter at a time

Forwarding is a patch. The clean end state is that the publisher sends directly to Reader. Most newsletter platforms let you change the email on an existing subscription in your account settings. Each one you move to your feed address is one Gmail filter you get to delete.

Substack has a shortcut worth knowing: free Substacks publish full RSS feeds, so you can subscribe inside Reader with the feed URL (usually newslettername.substack.com/feed) and skip email entirely. Paid Substacks truncate their RSS, so those stay on email forwarding.

One gotcha before you go

Reader shows an Unsubscribe button on newsletter emails. It does not unsubscribe you. It adds the sender to a Reader-side blocklist, which then swallows everything from that sender, including mail you forward on purpose. Undoing it currently means emailing Readwise support. When you want out of a newsletter, use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the issue itself.

The part forwarding does not solve

Disclosure: I build Weekly Brief, so read this section with that in mind.

Once the setup above works, you will notice what it does not do. Twenty newsletters still produce twenty documents a week, and Reader shows them in arrival order. Arrival order rewards whoever publishes most often, which is rarely who writes best. The pile is in a nicer app now. It is still a pile.

Weekly Brief is my answer to that half of the problem. It receives your newsletters, and once a week it delivers a single document into Reader: the issues worth your time ranked on top, each with a one-line reason, the rest listed underneath so nothing silently disappears. It ranks instead of summarizing, so you still read the originals in the author's own words. Free for up to 10 newsletters. There is a longer version of this whole setup, including how the brief fits into it, in the Reader forwarding guide.

Either way, do steps 1 through 3 today. Newsletters read differently once they stop arriving as obligations.

How to Send Substack Newsletters to Your Kindle for Free (3 Ways)

Weekly Brief (boseclaw) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:12:34 +0000

Kindle screens are better for reading than inboxes, but Substack has no "send to Kindle" button. If you want your subscriptions on the e-ink screen without paying for a forwarding service, you have three real options. All free. Fastest first.

Option 1: Forward posts to your Send-to-Kindle email

Amazon gives every Kindle its own email address. Anything mailed to it lands in your library like a document.

Steps:

Log in to Amazon and go to Account → Manage Your Content and Devices → Preferences → Personal Document Settings. Your Kindle's address is listed there, something like yourname_123@kindle.com.
On the same page, scroll to the Approved Personal Document E-mail List and add the address you send mail from (your Gmail, say). Amazon silently drops anything from a sender that isn't on this list, which is the step most people miss.
When a Substack issue arrives in your inbox, open it and forward it to your @kindle.com address. It shows up on the device within a few minutes, usually looking surprisingly clean since newsletters are mostly text.

What to expect: plain, text-heavy Substacks convert well. Image-heavy or heavily formatted issues can come out rough, and footnote links sometimes get mangled.

Some people try to skip the forwarding entirely by subscribing to a Substack with the Kindle address itself. It occasionally works, but you have to add the newsletter's sending address to the approved list, and any subscription that requires clicking a confirmation link is dead on arrival, because nobody is reading mail at your Kindle address. Manual forwarding is the reliable version of this trick.

The real cost of Option 1 isn't setup, it's repetition. You forward every issue, by hand, forever.

Option 2: Save the post as a PDF and send that

For the occasional long essay you want to keep, the web page itself is a better source than the email.

Steps:

Open the post on substack.com in a normal browser (the app has no export).
Use your browser's Print → Save as PDF.
Get the PDF to your device: email it to the same @kindle.com address from Option 1, or drop it into Amazon's Send to Kindle page or desktop app, which also accepts files directly.

PDFs are a page format, not a text format, so they don't reflow when you change font size. On a large Kindle this is fine; on a small one you'll be pinch-zooming. Use this for the two or three pieces a month you genuinely want to archive, not as a pipeline.

Option 3: Get one ranked weekly brief on your Kindle instead

Disclosure up front: this option is my product, Weekly Brief, so weigh this section accordingly.

Options 1 and 2 share a failure mode. If you follow more than two or three Substacks, you become the forwarding service. Every issue still demands a decision, and the ones you dutifully ship to the device pile up there instead of in your inbox. You moved the backlog to nicer hardware.

Weekly Brief takes a different approach: instead of forwarding issues one by one, you point your newsletter subscriptions at a single address (subscribe new ones with it, or auto-forward the ones already hitting Gmail). Once a week it reads everything that arrived and ranks it against what you said you care about. You get one document on your Kindle: the few issues worth your time on top, each with a one-line reason, and everything else listed below so nothing vanishes. It ranks rather than summarizes, so you still read the originals in the author's own words, just only the ones that earned it.

The free plan covers up to 10 newsletters, one brief a week, one destination (Kindle, Readwise Reader, or Matter), no card. If you want the Kindle-specific walkthrough, the setup guide is at brief.limed.tech/send-substack-to-kindle-free.

Which one should you use?

One or two Substacks, read most issues: Option 1. Five minutes of Amazon settings and you're done.
Occasional archiving of long reads: Option 2, alongside whatever else you do.
Five or more newsletters and a guilt pile: Option 3, or honestly, unsubscribe from a few. The forwarding trick doesn't scale; choosing does.

One last practical note for Options 1 and 2: sent documents live in your Kindle library under Docs, and Amazon's Personal Documents storage is generous but not infinite, so delete the ones you've read now and then.

How I turned 25 newsletter subscriptions into one ranked weekly brief (without another inbox)

Weekly Brief (boseclaw) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:17:00 +0000

I subscribe to about 25 newsletters. For a long time my relationship with them worked like this: subscribe with genuine excitement, read the first two issues, then watch the rest pile up in Gmail until the unread count made me feel bad enough to archive everything and start over.

The problem was never the newsletters. Most of them are good. The problem is that "good" and "worth my time this week" are different bars, and an inbox can't tell them apart. Every issue lands with identical urgency, mixed in with actual mail that needs answers. So the inbox becomes a guilt pile, and the genuinely great issue from a writer who posts once a quarter drowns under three "this week in JS" roundups covering the same three links.

Unsubscribing doesn't fix it either, because almost every newsletter earns its slot maybe once a month. You don't want zero issues. You want the right three.

Here's the workflow that finally worked for me, in two layers. The first layer you can build yourself in ten minutes. The second is harder, and it's where I'll disclose that I ended up building a product.

Layer 1: get newsletters out of the inbox entirely

The single biggest improvement is mechanical, not smart: newsletters should never land where your real mail lands. Route them to a read-later app instead.

Two ways to do it:

Option A: your read-later app's native newsletter address. Readwise Reader gives every account its own email address (Reader settings, under "Add email subscriptions"). Anything sent to that address shows up in your Reader feed instead of your inbox. When you subscribe to a new newsletter, use that address directly. Matter does the same thing.

Option B: a Gmail filter for the ones already coming in. For existing subscriptions you don't want to re-subscribe one by one, add a forwarding address in Gmail (Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, then verify it), and create a filter like:

Matches: list:(*) OR from:(substack.com OR beehiiv.com OR buttondown.email)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Forward to <your-reader-address>

The list:(*) trick catches most legitimate mailing lists because they set the List-Id header. You'll need to hand-tune a couple of senders, but 20 minutes of filter fiddling covers 90% of a typical subscription list.

If you want to script it instead, Reader also has a proper API: POST https://readwise.io/api/v3/save/ with your token in the Authorization header accepts raw HTML, so you can pipe anything into your queue programmatically. I used this for a while with a small script that pulled from a dedicated Gmail label.

After layer 1, your inbox is clean and your newsletters live in an app designed for reading. This is already a big win. Enjoy it for two weeks.

Layer 2: the firehose is still a firehose

Then notice the catch: you moved the pile to a nicer screen. Reader now shows 25 unread newsletters instead of Gmail showing 25 unread newsletters. The queue grows faster than you read. Same guilt, better typography.

The missing piece is ranking. Not summarizing — summaries answer "what does each issue say?", which still leaves you 25 things to process. The useful question is "which 3 should I actually open this week?"

You can hand-roll a crude version of this. Score each issue on three signals:

Interest match. Keep a short list of topics you currently care about (mine: local-first software, LLM evals, indie SaaS). +2 if the issue's subject or first paragraph clearly hits one.
Sender hit rate. Track which senders you actually finish reading. A newsletter you've opened 4 of the last 5 times outranks one you've skipped 5 straight. +1 or -1.
Duplication. If three roundups this week all link the same launch post, they're one unit of information. Keep the earliest or best one, demote the rest. -2 for a mostly-duplicate issue.

Sort descending, read the top 3, archive everything below without opening it. Even doing this manually with a notes file every Sunday beats reading in arrival order, because arrival order is the worst possible order: it rewards frequency, and frequency and quality are barely correlated.

The hand-rolled version's weakness is discipline. Scoring 25 issues by hand is exactly the kind of chore you skip on busy weeks, which are the weeks you need it most.

Disclosure: I built the thing

That's the part I automated, and it turned into a small product. Weekly Brief does the ranking layer for you: point your newsletters at it (directly or via forwarding), tell it what you care about, and once a week it delivers one brief — must-reads on top with a one-line reason each, everything else triaged below — straight to Readwise Reader, Matter, or Kindle. It ranks, it doesn't summarize; you still read the originals. Free tier covers up to 10 newsletters with one weekly brief, and there's a $5/mo plan for unlimited. It's young and I run it, so read this section with that bias in mind.

Whether you use it or hand-roll the scoring, the two-layer shape is the thing I'd push anyone drowning in subscriptions toward: first move newsletters out of the inbox, then add a ranking pass so the queue tells you where to spend your attention. Subscribing generously stops being a problem when arrival stops implying obligation.