Restarting a feed that stopped responding

Letterhead checks each RSS feed you add every few minutes. When a check fails, here’s what happens.

What Letterhead does when a feed fails

1. It retries. Most failures, such as a timeout or a brief outage at the source, are retried automatically, spaced out over the following hours, up to 15 times in a row by default (this can vary by account).
2. It stops checking. If the feed still fails, Letterhead stops checking it and marks it with an error status, labelled Invalid or Error depending on the failure, along with the last error it received. A few failures skip the retries and stop the feed straight away; they’re called out below.
3. It tells you, for a feed that belongs to a channel. The channel’s admins get an email with the error and suggested fixes, plus a notification in Letterhead, according to their notification settings.

A feed you added for your whole company, from the RSS Feeds tab, doesn’t send that email or notification today. Its error shows on the RSS Feeds tab, so check there if new stories stop arriving.

Until you restart it, a stopped feed brings in no new stories. Everything already in your library stays put.

What each error means

• Content too large. The feed is bigger than 1.5 MiB (1,572,864 bytes). Trim it: fewer items, shorter descriptions, or fewer embedded images. Stops the feed straight away.
• The request timed out. The feed’s server took too long to answer. This is often temporary; if it keeps happening, ask the feed’s provider.
• No content in the feed, an unexpected feed error occurred, the service encountered a bad gateway, the service is currently unavailable, or error fetching content. Letterhead couldn’t get valid content from the address.
• The request is invalid, too many requests, or the feed server refused the request. The feed’s server blocked or rejected Letterhead. “The request is invalid” stops the feed straight away; the other two are retried.
• There is a conflict with the request. More than one system is updating the feed at once. Make sure only one system publishes it. Stops the feed straight away.

What a feed needs to keep working

• It opens in a browser and is valid RSS or Atom: an XML document with a <channel> and at least one <item>. The W3C Feed Validator will tell you.
• Its server lets Letterhead in. Safelist *.tryletterhead.com, letterhead.email, and letterhead.ai, and accept the LetterheadCurationBot user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LetterheadCurationBot/1.0; +http://tryletterhead.com/bots).
• It stays under 1.5 MiB, and only one system publishes to it.

Fix the cause before you restart the feed, or it will simply stop again.

Start the feed again

1. Open Resources → Content Library and go to the RSS Feeds tab, which lists every feed in one place.
2. Find the feed with the Invalid or Error status and click Revalidate.
3. The feed goes back in line for its next check. Once that check succeeds, its status returns to Valid and new stories start arriving again.

Reset, on the same screen, does exactly the same thing, so if Revalidate didn’t clear the error, Reset won’t either. See resetting a feed.

When it’s ours to fix

If the feed opens in a browser, passes the validator, accepts Letterhead’s crawler, and still stops after you revalidate it, contact support with the feed’s address and the error it shows.

Related

• Adding RSS feeds
• How do I use the RSS block?