The RSS feed

Every newsletter publishes an RSS 2.0 feed at /feed.xml on its own site, carrying the 50 most recent issues it has sent. The feed is on from the day the newsletter exists, and there is nothing to switch on, fill in or choose.

The feed is published alongside the other pages you get, so its address is your site’s address. On the free one that is yourname.issuemint.com/feed.xml, and on your own domain it is yourdomain.com/feed.xml.

What the feed says about your newsletter

The channel at the top of the feed carries your newsletter’s name, a link to your home page, your description as plain text, and the date your most recent issue went out.

Your description is taken from Settings, then General, with the markdown stripped out and the first 400 characters kept, because a feed reader shows that line under your title in its list of subscriptions. The feed also declares itself as English and states its own address, which is how a reader’s app keeps track of where it got your issues from.

What each item contains

Each item in the feed is one sent issue: its subject as the title, a link to its page on your site, the date and time it went out, and your intro as the item body.

The link and the item’s permanent identifier are both the issue’s own page, so a reader who clicks through in any app lands on the same URL that everything else about the issue points at. Dates are the real send times rather than the moment the feed was fetched, so an app can sort your issues correctly the first time it sees them.

The intro, not the whole issue

The feed carries an issue’s intro and nothing after it. The links, the section headings, your commentary under each link and any sponsored items are not in the feed.

That is deliberate. An issue of a curated newsletter is a set of links, and a set of links pasted into a feed reader is a worse version of the same thing, stripped of the layout that makes it readable. The intro is the part that tells somebody whether this issue is for them, and the item links to the issue’s own page for the rest. It also means a sponsor’s placement is never syndicated somewhere you cannot see it.

One consequence worth knowing: links inside an intro as it appears in the feed are the plain destinations, not tracked ones, so a click made inside a feed reader does not appear in your numbers. Clicks from the issue page do, which is covered in how click tracking works.

Fifty issues, then the archive

The feed holds your 50 most recent issues and stops there.

That is roughly a year of weekly publishing, which is far more than any reader needs in an app and enough that a new subscriber can catch up. Older issues stay published on your archive for good, 25 to a page, and the sitemap keeps pointing search engines at every one of them.

How readers find the feed

Every page on a newsletter site names the feed in its head, so browsers, feed readers and anything that reads a page for you can discover it without being told the address.

Practically, that means a reader can paste your home page into their app of choice and it will find the feed itself. It also means the archive is readable by software that has never heard of Issue Mint, which is part of what makes a hosted archive worth having rather than a folder of sent emails.

Nothing about the feed is configurable

There is no setting anywhere in Issue Mint that changes the feed, and this is the honest list of what that rules out.

You cannot publish full issues instead of intros, change how many issues it holds, have separate feeds per section or per category, get an Atom or JSON version, add author or category tags, attach images as enclosures, or move it to another address. If you need one of those, say which and why, because the feed is deliberately small and we would rather add one thing that matters than a page of options.