These dedicated newsletter reading apps make managing your subscriptions easier and help you read newsletters in one place. While they also have other features like discovering the best newsletters, the focus is on keeping your inbox clean and gathering all your reading material in one place.
1. Mailscribe (Web): Free, Ad-Free, Private, No-Limit Online Newsletter Reader
Many dedicated newsletter readers have some hidden limits in the free accounts or include ads, which spoils the experience. Plus, whether you know it or not, some third-party newsletters are tracking your activity online right from your inbox. Mailscribe is trying to bust all those with a dedicated newsletter reader that is free without limits and protects your privacy.
Once you sign up for it, create a new “@mailscribe.com” email address alias. You can create multiple aliases too. Use these whenever you subscribe to a newsletter; the email will land in Mailscribe instead of your inbox. In the app’s settings, you can also set whether you want to get notifications or a daily summary, block certain newsletter spammers, and even set whether you want to enable or disable third-party tracking (disabled by default).
The main inbox is simple and no-frills, but it tells you exactly what you want to know. Every newsletter issue shows the headline, a snippet, how long it’ll take to read, and whether other Mailscribe users have liked it. In the right sidebar, you can filter newsletters by unread or favorites and time periods like today or this week.
The only problem with Mailscribe is that it doesn’t import your existing subscriptions from Gmail or elsewhere. So you will still need to re-subscribe to all of them.
2. Meco (Web, iOS): Dedicated Newsletter Reader for Gmail Users
If your Gmail inbox is cluttered with newsletters that you want to read but haven’t gotten around to, Meco is a good-looking dedicated newsletter reader to solve your issues. Give it access to your inbox, and Meco will take a few minutes to gather all the newsletters you are already subscribed to.
Then, choose from the list of subscriptions you want to send to Meco. You can also create groups out of multiple newsletters and choose to get notified at certain times to build better reading habits. Once all this setup is done, you’re ready to use Meco finally.
And boy, it’s such a pleasant reading experience. Meco’s design and fonts focus on readability, showing you a well-formatted inbox and the ability to switch between articles quickly. It’ll also show you a digest or snapshot of the latest newsletters in your inbox that you haven’t read yet.
Meco’s app for iPhones is just as beautiful, and it’s a shame that Android users can’t enjoy this experience. Because it works through your Gmail, unlike many other dedicated newsletter readers, Meco doesn’t give you a custom email address to bypass your inbox when subscribing to future newsletters.
Download: Meco for iOS (Free)
3. Newsletterss (Web, Android, iOS): Newsletter Reader for Mobile and Desktop, With RSS
Newsetterss is another simple reader for all your subscribed newsletters, but with a couple of features that make it worth checking out. First, it syncs across mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms, so you can access it anywhere. And yes, the mobile apps are well-made, giving you a comfortable reading experience.
Second, Newsletterss can also connect to your favorite RSS reader. Along with a custom “@newsletterss.com” email address to subscribe to newsletters, you’ll also be given an RSS feed link for the items that come to your inbox. You can then plug these into any RSS reader and read updates there. It’s a feature-filling addition since several newsletters aren’t available as RSS feeds anymore, which they used to be before. This lets you read RSS feeds and newsletters in the same place, like Stoop, one of the best email newsletter managers.
The basic Newsletterss app is simple, acting just like an inbox. While there is no way to auto-import your existing newsletter subscriptions into the app, you can set up email filters for any future newsletter updates to drop directly into your new reading box.
In the premium version of Newsletterss, you can get unlimited RSS updates, send newsletters to Pocket or Kindle to read them later and remove all ads.
Download: Newsletterss for Android | iOS (Free)
4. Substack Reader (Android, iOS): Dedicated Inbox for Substack Subscription Newsletters
Even among all the best email newsletter platforms, Substack stands as the king with some of the most popular newsletters in the world. Go through your newsletter subscriptions, and you’ll find that most of them are on Substack. So that’s why Substack built a Reader app for phones to help you read your favorite newsletters and discover new ones.
Substack Reader is free and will import your existing subscriptions. The clean interface and clear font make for strain-free reading, and you can easily save articles for later or archive entries that you aren’t interested in.
Like with Substack’s recent push online, the app tries to encourage likes and comments on articles. They’re also trying to push community discussions through a chat feature. Frankly, it all feels a little forced when all you want to do is read quality content, and comes across as a distraction. But of course, Substack Reader’s biggest disadvantage is that you can’t use it to subscribe to any non-Substack newsletters.
Download: Substack Reader for Android | iOS (Free)
5. Slick Inbox (Android, iOS): Best Overall Mobile Newsletter Reader for Phones
While researching for this article, we checked out several great mobile-centric newsletter reader apps like LaterMail, Newsletterist, and the aforementioned Stoop. They’re all excellent in their way, but we found ourselves returning to Slick Inbox even years after calling it one of the best non-email apps to read newsletters.
It’s not that Slick Inbox offers a slew of extra features or anything. Although yes, the ability to unsubscribe to any newsletter in one tap is quite cool and useful. Slick Inbox understands that at its core, newsletter subscriptions are for reading. And it delivers a more pleasing reading experience than any other app.
Title cards with large fonts and estimated reading time make it easy to choose what you want to read. When you’re reading an article, it’s presented in clear text and well-aligned images, stripped of original formatting, to look good on a mobile screen. It sounds like no big deal, and it really should be. But after using all the other apps, Slick Inbox feels just that little bit more refined to make it our favorite.
Download: Slick Inbox for Android | iOS (Free)
How to Use Gmail Filters to Find Subscribed Newsletters
Apart from Meco, these dedicated newsletter reader apps don’t automatically import your existing newsletter subscriptions for Gmail. So you’ll have to manually forward them to your new email address as generated by the app you use. However, there’s a trick to make this easier.
First, search “unsubscribe” in Gmail to find all newsletters you are currently receiving — this will include both the spam ones and the quality content you want. Then, quickly go through the list and select one message from the newsletters you want to forward to your new app. Once selected, give them a label by the name of your new app.
Now click that label in your inbox. Next, open each email and set up auto-forwarding in Gmail for all emails from the original sender. Yes, this step is a little tedious, but it’s a one-time task to get a clutter-free inbox and a dedicated newsletter reader finally.
