Feed Owner FAQ

B2B Services

Absolutely! The easiest option is generating a subscription URL for your feed and share that with your readers. For example you can add a link at the bottom of your articles.

If you want to provide a bit more integration you can provide a subscription form using the following template. Simply customize the HTML and apply CSS to match the look and feel of your site.

<form action="https://feedmail.org/subscriptions/confirm">
	<!-- The URL of your feed. -->
	<input type=hidden name=url value="https://yoursite.example/feed/">

	<!-- Return URL after subscription is confirmed. Optional -->
	<input type=hidden name=r value="https://yoursite.example">

	<label>Email: <input type=email name=email required></label>
	<button>Subscribe</button>
</form>

Either way, all of your readers will get free credits which will cover most feeds for years. For example if you post weekly it will last over 7 years.

If you want to cover your readers' costs contact support to set it up. Owner-paid feeds are billed at 1 credit per email just like regular subscriptions, except the feed owner is charged instead of the subscriber.

Polling

How can I identify FeedMail polling?

FeedMail uses a User-Agent header that starts with feedmail.org/{version} where {version} is a decimal integer. The version does not change often but may be updated if an important change is made to FeedMail polling.

Other tokens may be added to the User-Agent header separated by whitespace.

How often does FeedMail poll my feed?

FeedMail intelligently varies its polling rate based on a number of factors.

WebSub will be used if supported and polls will occur weekly.
If the last attempt to fetch your feed failed, fetches will slow down linearly with jitter.
If a Cache-Control header is present FeedMail will not poll more often than the max-age specified, up to 24h.
If fetching your feed takes longer that 1s or conditional requests are not available a slower polling speed will be selected.
Otherwise FeedMail will select a frequency to poll your feed based on factors such as update frequency and subscriber count. If your feed is active and fast, polls can occur as frequently as every 5min.

We do change our algorithm from time-to-time, so please reach out if you have any concerns.

Does FeedMail support caching?

Yes, FeedMail supports caching. The Cache-Control max-age parameter is respected and FeedMail will make conditional requests using the Date and ETag headers.

Does FeedMail poll more often if I have more subscribers?

In general no, FeedMail coalesces updates from multiple subscribers together. However, our polling rate algorithm may choose to poll feeds with more subscribers more frequently.

Does FeedMail support WebSub?

WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) is a protocol for push updates for RSS feeds. FeedMail supports WebSub and will subscribe and reduce polling rate if it is available.

Analytics

Can I see my FeedMail subscriber count?

At this time we have no mechanism for viewing your subscriber count.

Can I see my subscriber's information?

FeedMail will never share subscriber information, other than anonymized subscriber count, with feed owners or any other third-party.

Support

FeedMail is overloading my server!

The quickest fix is to add a Cache-Control header to your feed, FeedMail will never poll more often than the value in the max-age parameter, unless it is larger than 24h in which case FeedMail may poll more often, but no more frequently than every 24h.

If that does not work, or can not be done, contact FeedMail Support and we'll find a solution promptly.

FeedMail is handing my feed incorrectly.

We recommend that you first test your feed on the W3C feed validator and fix any errors that arise. If you are still seeing problems or are unable to fix the error please contact FeedMail Support and we will try to find a solution.