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

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.