Adding RSS feeds in Letterhead

RSS feeds are the hands-off way to fill your Curations library: connect a feed once and new articles flow in automatically, ready to drop into newsletters. You manage feeds from your Curations area, alongside the other content sources feeding your newsletters.

Tip

For a one-off URL you want in a single newsletter, use the URL block instead of adding a feed — see when to use which.

Before you add a feed

• Validate it — run the feed URL through the free W3C Feed Validator. If it passes there, it should work in Letterhead. For third-party feeds that fail validation, contact the feed’s publisher.
• Safelist Letterhead’s crawler — so Letterhead can reach the feed uninterrupted, safelist *.tryletterhead.com, letterhead.email, and letterhead.ai. The crawler is named LetterheadCurationBot with user agent Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LetterheadCurationBot/1.0; +http://tryletterhead.com/bots).

Add a feed

1. Open Curations and go to the RSS Feeds tab.
2. Click Add feed and provide a Title, Description, and the Feed URL.
3. Choose whether to check Enable advanced feed crawling. If you plan to use the RSS block directly, leave it off; for what it does and when to turn it on, see Advanced feed crawling below.
4. Optionally add Tags — every new item from this feed is tagged with them automatically — see Tag new items automatically below.
5. Under Automatically Delete Old Curations, choose how long items stay in your library (30 days by default, or Never to keep them indefinitely) — see Automatically delete old curations below.

After saving, Letterhead picks the feed up at its next scheduled check, so new items usually begin appearing in your library within about five minutes.

What a feed should look like

Letterhead reads a standard RSS 2.0 feed — an <rss> document with one <channel> and one <item> per article. If your feed passes the W3C Feed Validator, it will work; the more of the fields below your feed includes, the richer each curated item is.

Here’s an example item showing the elements Letterhead reads:

<rss version="2.0"
     xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
     xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
     xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">
  <channel>
    <title>The Daily Ledger</title>
    <link>https://example.com</link>
    <description>News and analysis</description>

    <item>
      <title>City council approves new transit plan</title>
      <link>https://example.com/transit-plan</link>
      <guid>https://example.com/transit-plan</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <dc:creator>Jordan Rivera</dc:creator>
      <category>Transit</category>
      <category>Local Government</category>
      <description>The council voted 6-1 to fund the expansion.</description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The council voted 6-1 to fund the expansion.</p>]]></content:encoded>
      <media:content url="https://example.com/img/transit.jpg" />
    </item>

  </channel>
</rss>

What Letterhead pulls from each <item>:

• <title> — the curated item’s title. (required)
• <link> — the article’s URL. If it’s absent, Letterhead falls back to the item’s <guid>. (strongly recommended — without it the story links nowhere)
• <pubDate> — the publication date, used to order stories. If it’s missing, the item is dated to when Letterhead imports it.
• <description> — used for the item’s excerpt (Letterhead takes the first sentence). If no image is found elsewhere, Letterhead also looks for the first <img> inside it.
• <content:encoded> — the full article body, used when a block is set to show full content. Requires the content namespace declared on <rss> (as above).
• <dc:creator> — the author byline. Requires the dc namespace.
• <category> — one or more per item; each becomes a tag on the curated item (see the next section).
• Image — Letterhead uses the first it finds, in this order: <media:content url="…">, then <media:thumbnail url="…">, then <enclosure url="…">, then the first <img> in the <description>. The media: nodes require the media namespace; see ensuring your images appear.

Atom feeds work too — for the article URL, Letterhead reads the href attribute on <link>.

Advanced feed crawling

Advanced feed crawling is an optional per-feed setting that enriches the metadata Letterhead collects. Most feeds don’t need it — standard RSS metadata imports just fine — so only enable it when a feed is missing key details like images, excerpts, or author names.

• Disabled (default) — Letterhead uses only the data the feed provides: title, description, image.
• Enabled — Letterhead’s crawler also visits the webpage each feed item links to and reads Open Graph tags and other structured data from the page, supplementing or updating what the feed provided.

The richer data comes at a cost: crawling every linked page takes longer and generates more bot traffic to your site.

Turn it on for a feed only if you hit one of these:

• The feed lacks images, excerpts, or author names that the webpages do have.
• The webpage data is more current or complete than the feed data.
• You run multiple brands or domains through one feed and need distinct publisher names per site.

Leave it off when:

• The feed already includes everything you need.
• You ingest a high volume of content and want faster imports.
• Your site restricts bots (login walls, paywalls, crawler blocks) — Letterhead can’t crawl content behind authentication, including private sites and social platforms.
• You need to keep crawl volume down to avoid rate-limit errors on your server.

To enable it, edit the feed on the RSS Feeds tab, check Enable advanced feed crawling, and save. For crawling to succeed, your site must allow Letterhead’s crawler — the same safelisting described above.

Best practice: test on one or two feeds first to see whether metadata actually improves. If images still aren’t coming through, see ensuring your images appear in the RSS block.

How items are tagged and categorized

Every item Letterhead imports from a feed is labeled automatically, from two different systems, so your library stays filterable without manual work:

• Tags — labels you control. These come from two places, and both are applied as you import:
  • Your default tags — any Tags you set on the feed are applied to every new item from it (see Tag new items automatically below).
  • The feed’s own categories — if a feed includes categories on its items (the <category> labels a publisher attaches to each entry), Letterhead reads them and applies them as tags on the imported item, on top of your default tags. Any category that already matches one of your default tags is skipped (so you don’t get duplicates), and any tag that doesn’t exist yet is created for you. These behave like any other tag — you can edit or remove them on individual items.
• IAB categories — labels Letterhead applies for you. Separately from tags, every item is auto-assigned an industry-standard IAB category by a fixed, rule-based engine. IAB categories can’t be created or edited; see automatic IAB categorization.

You can filter your Curations library by tags or by IAB categories.

Tag new items automatically

Set default tags on a feed and every new item imported from it arrives pre-labeled, so filtering your library while building a newsletter takes seconds.

1. Open Curations and go to the RSS Feeds tab.
2. Click Add Feed, or open an existing feed and choose Edit Feed.
3. In the feed settings, search for an existing tag or type a new one and press Enter.
4. Save the feed.

A few things to know:

• Each feed has its own default set — tag your SEO feed seo-updates and your email-tips feed email-strategy.
• Tags stay editable — you can add, edit, or remove tags on individual items after import.
• Changes apply to future items only — existing items keep the tags they already have.
• Tag formatting — tags can include letters, numbers, and hyphens, but no spaces or special characters. marketing-trends works; marketing trends and marketing@2025 don’t.

How Letterhead keeps feeds fresh

Letterhead scans for new content on a short cycle, roughly every five minutes — but a feed that fails isn’t checked again that quickly. Most failures are treated as worth retrying — a timeout, a rate limit, a brief outage at the source, an address that no longer resolves, or anything else Letterhead can’t identify with certainty — and Letterhead spaces those retries out, trying up to 15 times over the following hours before marking the feed invalid and showing the last error it received.

Only a few unambiguous problems skip the retries and mark a feed invalid on the very first failure: a request the feed’s server rejects as malformed, a response too large to process, and a URL that redirects too many times. A feed whose address has simply gone dead is not one of these — expect it to retry for a while before the error surfaces. An invalid feed isn’t checked again until you revalidate or reset it; see revalidating an RSS feed.

A few behaviors worth knowing:

• Duplicates are filtered — Letterhead detects items it has already curated so your library stays clean; see How duplicates are detected below.
• Updated publish dates repull the story — if you change an article’s publication date at the source, Letterhead refreshes the story in your library with the new date, so story order stays correct.
• Tag inline — you can add or create tags for any curated item directly in the library table, without opening the item.

How duplicates are detected

For each incoming item, Letterhead compares a few key attributes:

• Original URL — the item’s direct link. If that URL has already been processed, the item is flagged as a duplicate. This is the primary signal.
• Channel — the check applies within the channel the feed belongs to.
• Feed identity — items are tracked back to the feed they came from, so Letterhead knows each item’s origin.
• Item type — items pulled automatically from RSS are tracked separately from manually curated ones.

To avoid accidental repeats:

• Use unique, consistent URLs — detection keys on the URL, so the same content published under different URLs is treated as distinct. Give each piece of content one canonical URL.
• Avoid redirects in feed URLs — URLs that redirect elsewhere may be treated as unique even when they point to the same content.
• Watch multi-source feeds — if you pull from several feeds, make sure the same content isn’t arriving under more than one.
• Standardize your metadata — a consistent URL and metadata structure helps the system recognize repeats.

Automatically delete old curations

Automatic deletion keeps your library fresh without manual cleanup: each source clears out its old items on a schedule you choose. By default, curations are deleted after 30 days, and you can pick a different schedule per source.

To change it for an existing feed, select it on the RSS Feeds tab, scroll to Automatically delete old curations in the side panel, choose the number of days from the dropdown, and click Update feed. For a new feed, set the same option while adding it.

Picking a schedule:

• Short (1–7 days) for fast-paced, news-based sources, so your library only shows current stories.
• Longer (14–30 days) for content that stays useful for a while but does eventually date.
• Never for a source whose stories don’t go stale — reference material, explainers, recipes, an evergreen archive. Nothing from the feed is ever deleted on a schedule, so your library keeps building.

Choose Never deliberately rather than as a default. A busy feed set to Never keeps everything it has ever published, so the curation browser will grow steadily and older stories will sit alongside new ones. If you mainly want recent material with a handful of lasting pieces, a shorter schedule plus saving the keepers elsewhere is usually easier to work with.

You can change a source’s schedule at any time, and the new setting applies from then on — curations already deleted don’t come back.

Manage all your feeds in one place

The RSS Feeds tab in Curations shows every feed across all your newsletters in one company-wide list, so you don’t have to check them one newsletter at a time. From there you can:

• See which channels use each feed — each feed shows how many channels it feeds.
• Add new feeds that can serve any of your newsletters.
• Recheck quiet feeds — manually refresh feeds that haven’t updated recently.
• Remove unused feeds you no longer need.

If your company shares Letterhead with other organizations, the tab shows only your own feeds — they stay fully separate from other companies’.

Reset a feed

On the RSS Feeds tab, Reset does the same thing as Revalidate: it clears the feed’s error status and puts it back in line for its next scheduled check, rather than checking it on the spot. It doesn’t re-curate old items or reprocess anything already in your Curations library. Letterhead still asks you to confirm before resetting, since it’s easy to click by mistake.

Prefer to work in conversation?

Penpal can browse your curated content in conversation — for example, “show me my latest curations.” See how Penpal works.