Three ways to send an RSS feed to email

There are three practical ways to get an RSS feed to email. A hosted service mails new items to you, an email platform's RSS campaign mails them to a subscriber list, and a small n8n workflow lets you control the layout and the filter.

This is a walkthrough from each tool's own docs and pricing pages, read on 2026-10-16. We did not run the three setups, so nothing below is a result. Where behaviour depends on the feed, we say what to watch for. Prices change, so check the live page before you pay for anything.

It covers two readers: someone who wants a feed in their own inbox, and someone who wants to send a feed to subscribers. It skips WordPress plugins, Outlook's built-in RSS reader and email-to-RSS, which goes the other way. If you want the full pipeline with dedup, clean text and a summary, read how to build a daily news newsletter from feeds.

The three ways at a glance

	Hosted service	Email platform RSS campaign	n8n workflow
Examples	Blogtrottr, Feedrabbit	Buttondown, MailerLite, Mailchimp	n8n RSS Feed Trigger plus Send Email
Sends to	You (Blogtrottr's Lite and Full plans add more addresses you verify)	Your subscriber list	Whoever you put in the To field
Layout control	Little on free plans	A template, with limits	Full HTML, you write it
Cost shown that day	Blogtrottr free with ads, paid from EUR 1.33/mo. Feedrabbit free, Premium USD 25/year	Depends on platform and plan, see below	n8n Cloud Starter EUR 20/mo billed annually, or self-host
Best for	Reading a feed in your inbox	A newsletter people subscribe to	Custom filtering and layout

A hosted service sends the RSS feed to email

Paste a feed URL, enter your address, and pick single emails or a digest. That is the whole setup.

Blogtrottr's help page says free accounts get real-time updates only for WebSub-enabled feeds and poll every hour otherwise. Digests roll updates into one email every 2, 4, 6, 8 or 12 hours, or daily. Its pricing page lists a free ad-supported plan with unlimited subscriptions. Paid plans start at EUR 1.33/mo for no ads. Webhook delivery, API access and extra delivery addresses are Lite (from EUR 3.33/mo) and Full features.

Feedrabbit is the same kind of service. Its free plan allows 10 subscriptions, 20 emails a day and a 3 hour fetch interval. Premium is USD 25 per year for 100 subscriptions, 200 emails a day and 60 minute fetching.

These services mail you. They are not built to send to a list of other people, and neither page describes a subscriber list.

Pick this if you want a feed in your own inbox and do not want to run anything.

Your email platform can run an RSS campaign

If the readers are subscribers, use the RSS feature of the platform that already holds your list. This is the route for anyone searching "rss to newsletter". We read three help or docs pages, and they differ on price.

Platform	RSS to email	Plan, per its docs
Buttondown	On each new item, weekly or monthly. Can send or create a draft.	The docs say "Available on the Basic plan." We did not confirm what Basic costs, because the pricing page was partly unreadable.
MailerLite	RSS campaign, daily, weekly or monthly. One feed per RSS campaign.	The help page says RSS campaigns are a paid feature on Comfort and Power. The feature page offers a 14-day trial.
Mailchimp	RSS automation, daily, weekly or monthly. Sends only when there is something new.	We did not confirm which plans include it.

Details worth knowing before you choose:

• Buttondown checks your feed every thirty minutes for the per-item trigger. A "skip old items" setting ignores anything published more than a day before it is discovered, which matters when you connect a feed that already has content. It tells items apart by guid, or Atom id, and falls back to the link.
• MailerLite checks the feed five minutes before a send.
• Mailchimp's help page says RSS automations send once per day at most, and that posts should be published at least 3 hours before the send. The email builder does not control the RSS content.

Pick this if you send to subscribers. Check the plan price on the live page before you commit, since two of the three rows above are unconfirmed.

A small n8n workflow gives you the layout

n8n suits you if you already run it, or want to filter items before anyone sees them. The core is three nodes: an RSS Feed Trigger, a Code step that builds the email body, and a Send Email node.

The docs describe the RSS Feed Trigger as starting a workflow when a new item is published. You choose a poll mode such as every hour, every X minutes or a cron expression, and give it the feed URL. The Send Email node sends through an SMTP credential, and its Email Format can be Text, HTML or Both.

The Code node below is a sketch. It is untested, and it assumes the trigger passes items with title, link and pubDate fields. Check the field names against a real execution before you rely on it.

// Untested sketch: Code node, "Run Once for All Items"
const items = $input.all().map(i => i.json);

const rows = items
  .map(i => `<li><a href="${i.link}">${i.title}</a></li>`)
  .join("\n");

return [{
  json: {
    subject: `${items.length} new stories`,
    html: `<ul>\n${rows}\n</ul>`,
  },
}];

Wire subject and html into the Send Email node as expressions. If the trigger fires once per item, you will get one email per item, not one digest. A digest needs a schedule-based trigger that reads the feed and a step that collects only new items. That is the part we would build and test first.

n8n Cloud lists Starter at EUR 20/mo billed annually and Pro at EUR 50/mo billed annually, with a free trial and no card. You can self-host the Community Edition from GitHub. Its licence is fair-code, not OSI open source.

Pick this if you already use n8n or need your own filter.

What to expect with a Google News feed

These tools are built around ordinary blog feeds. A Google News search feed behaves differently. What follows comes from our earlier posts, not from testing:

• Item links are news.google.com/rss/articles/... redirects, not publisher URLs. The email will show those unless something resolves them. See how to get the real article URL.
• The feed carries a headline and a source name, not the article body. See the Google News RSS feed guide for the URL formats and what an item contains.
• The same story appears under several headlines. A digest will list each one. See why matching headlines isn't enough.
• A search feed returns many items at once. How a hosted service or an RSS campaign treats a first batch of dozens is something to watch for on your first send, not something we measured.

None of the three methods resolves the redirect, reads the article or merges rewritten headlines. A Google Alerts RSS feed can be an input too, see how to get a Google Alerts RSS feed.

Which one to pick

You want	Pick
A feed in your own inbox	A hosted service
A newsletter to subscribers, with unsubscribe handled	Your email platform's RSS campaign
Your own filter or layout, and you already run n8n	n8n

If you are unsure, start with the hosted service. It is free to try.

What we did not check

• That any of the three setups works end to end. We did not run them.
• Delivery speed and spam-folder placement.
• WordPress plugins, Zapier, IFTTT, and the built-in RSS support in Outlook and Apple Mail.
• Which Mailchimp plans include RSS automations, and the Buttondown Basic price.
• Whether any email platform's RSS campaign accepts an Atom or JSON Feed URL other than what its docs state.

The sending layer is left out of what a newsletter's news stack costs per month, which prices the news-gathering side.

Where Feedmarkdown fits

Feedmarkdown takes a Google News query or a Google Alerts feed and returns the stories with the publisher URL resolved, full-text Markdown and cross-source dedup. Output is a JSON Feed or Atom URL, or one signed webhook POST per article.

It does not send email. It could sit upstream of method 2 or 3, if the tool accepts the URL. Buttondown's docs mention Atom, but we have not tested ours with it. Plain RSS and direct site sources are not supported yet. See the pricing or the home page.