Mailbrew launched to all back in February 2020 and I've been using it ever since. This is basically a way for you to create your own personal mailing lists where you get the things you're most interested in delivered to your mailbox on whatever schedule you'd like.

Here's an image from Mailbrew's website that gives you a taste of what you can expect.

In short, this allows you to use news sources like Reddit, Twitter, RSS, Hacker News, Twitter, and more to surface the stuff you are most interested in reading.

Examples

Here's a few ideas for things you could follow.

• Get the top voted "shower thoughts" post from that always interesting subreddit
• Get the top quote of the day from the quotes subreddit
• Get the top 10 posts from the Hacker News front page
• Create an email that includes all of your favorite film essay YouTubers
• See the top tweets for a specific hashtag on Twitter
• Find yourself or your company in Google News updates
• Follow a low-volume RSS feed

No matter what you do, you can use Mailbrew's WYSIWYG email creation editor to format the email nicely and customize things like how much you want to emphasize text vs images in the email. For example, I want to see headlines and the first line or two of articles from Hacker News and other news sources, but I really just want to see photos from the "pics" subreddit.

And if you have trouble starting from scratch, there are tons of templates they have created already to get you going. You can then create your own emails or modify the templates with more or less sources of data depending on your taste.

Pricing

Mailbrew is $10/month, which ain't cheap, but there's a free trial if you want to give it a shot, and frankly, I'm happy to pay to make sure this sticks around and doesn't sell my data as their monetization model. As they say in their FAQ:

We're a small startup, and for us to be able to build Mailbrew sustainably, we need to charge for it. Not only does this align our incentives with yours (we never sell your data or advertise to you), it ensures that Mailbrew will continue to work in the future. We are in this for the long haul.

Should You Use It?

I mean, maybe. I don't think everyone needs Mailbrew, but people who do will get a ton out of it. You do need to figure out what content and what frequency you want to get these custom newsletters, but if you put in a little work up front then you can reap the benefits going forward.

If you're interested, there is a free trial and if you use this link, you and I each get $5 credit towards the subscription.