A minimalistic cat-like app that delivers a digest of your RSS feeds as templated newsletter.

How it works? Simple! Every day at 11 am (or at time of your choosing) letter runs on the server via cron and fetches all your precious RSS feeds to check whether there is anything new from yesterday. After some mapping and rendering newsletter digest is created and sent via e-mail. All in a catsy manner. And right into your inbox.

Quick howto

Notice: Letter assumes your personal feeds.opml or feeds.txt in /rss folder. You can create either one manually or in case of OPML format you can also export it from preferred service (like Feedly or whatever). OPML is de-facto standard for importing and exporting RSS feeds in such services so it should be relatively easy.

Running automatically with Letter Template (easiest and recommeded way)

You can receive your daily readings with Letter automatically by using this Letter Template. Just set up required environment variables and you're good to go. You can also adjust newsletter look to your liking.

Running standalone on your server or local machine

1. Clone repository to desired location

   git clone https://github.com/radekkozak/letter.git

2. Install

   npm ci

3. Rename .env.example to .env and add your own configuration there.

4. Run one time

   npm run letter

5. OR run periodically : as described, letter is meant to be run at specific schedule. This can easily be achieved via cron directive. Cron tab needs to be created separately. For example, below settings would run letter every day at 11 o'clock server time (assuming npm is correctly in your PATH)

   0 11 * * * cd /fullpath/to/your/letter/folder && npm run letter

Email newsletter template

Letter uses Handlebars with html extension as default templating engine. Email is generated from letter template inside emails directory. You can make it your own as you please. Templating assumes the structure of html, subject and text html files. Here's how letter template looks by default:

Notes

OPML file structure can be flat or nested

Sometimes certain services like i.e Feedly, export OPML feeds in a nested manner. Letter supports both flat and categorized notations. Even in the same file. Please see feeds.opml.example . Don't forget to set LETTER_FEEDS to opml if you choose this format, so Letter knows what file you want it to pick.

Gmail considerations

If you use Gmail for sending out the newsletter and your account has Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled you need to generate app-specific password which then can be used in place of your regular SMTP_PASSWORD variable in .env file.

License

Meow-what ? Cats don't need no stinking licenses. Just be good and state the source of the original cat [wink].

Cats and credits

I have tried hard to find original authors of cat gif and cat avatar used in the template and header. Long time ago i found those chucklesome pics sitting in my old computer folder one day and they sparked me to make this simple why-not weekend project. Funny enough i found myself using it for this day (What can i say - i just love my RSS readings delivered as email - i'm weird that way) Aaanywho - if you are the original author of any of these lovely cats, please let me know so i could give credit where credit is due.