Adding RSS feeds in Letterhead

RSS feeds are the hands-off way to fill your Curations library: connect a feed once and new articles flow in automatically, ready to drop into newsletters. You manage feeds from your Curations area, alongside the other content sources feeding your newsletters.

Tip

For a one-off URL you want in a single newsletter, use the URL block instead of adding a feed — see when to use which.

Before you add a feed

• Validate it — run the feed URL through the free W3C Feed Validator. If it passes there, it should work in Letterhead. For third-party feeds that fail validation, contact the feed’s publisher.
• Safelist Letterhead’s crawler — so Letterhead can reach the feed uninterrupted, safelist *.tryletterhead.com, letterhead.email, and letterhead.ai. The crawler is named LetterheadCurationBot with user agent Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LetterheadCurationBot/1.0; +http://tryletterhead.com/bots).

Add a feed

1. Open Curations and go to the RSS Feeds tab.
2. Click Add feed and provide a Title, Description, and the Feed URL.
3. Choose whether to check Enable advanced feed crawling. If you plan to use the RSS block directly, leave it off; for what it does and when to turn it on, see advanced feed crawling.
4. Optionally add Tags — every new item from this feed is tagged with them automatically — see auto-tagging new feed items.
5. Under Automatically Delete Old Curations, choose how long items stay in your library (30 days by default, or Never to keep them indefinitely) — see how auto-deletion works.

After saving, Letterhead starts checking the feed, and new items should begin appearing in your library within about 20 minutes.

What a feed should look like

Letterhead reads a standard RSS 2.0 feed — an <rss> document with one <channel> and one <item> per article. If your feed passes the W3C Feed Validator, it will work; the more of the fields below your feed includes, the richer each curated item is.

Here’s an example item showing the elements Letterhead reads:

<rss version="2.0"
     xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
     xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
     xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">
  <channel>
    <title>The Daily Ledger</title>
    <link>https://example.com</link>
    <description>News and analysis</description>

    <item>
      <title>City council approves new transit plan</title>
      <link>https://example.com/transit-plan</link>
      <guid>https://example.com/transit-plan</guid>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <dc:creator>Jordan Rivera</dc:creator>
      <category>Transit</category>
      <category>Local Government</category>
      <description>The council voted 6-1 to fund the expansion.</description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The council voted 6-1 to fund the expansion.</p>]]></content:encoded>
      <media:content url="https://example.com/img/transit.jpg" />
    </item>

  </channel>
</rss>

What Letterhead pulls from each <item>:

• <title> — the curated item’s title. (required)
• <link> — the article’s URL. If it’s absent, Letterhead falls back to the item’s <guid>. (strongly recommended — without it the story links nowhere)
• <pubDate> — the publication date, used to order stories. If it’s missing, the item is dated to when Letterhead imports it.
• <description> — used for the item’s excerpt (Letterhead takes the first sentence). If no image is found elsewhere, Letterhead also looks for the first <img> inside it.
• <content:encoded> — the full article body, used when a block is set to show full content. Requires the content namespace declared on <rss> (as above).
• <dc:creator> — the author byline. Requires the dc namespace.
• <category> — one or more per item; each becomes a tag on the curated item (see the next section).
• Image — Letterhead uses the first it finds, in this order: <media:content url="…">, then <media:thumbnail url="…">, then <enclosure url="…">, then the first <img> in the <description>. The media: nodes require the media namespace; see ensuring your images appear.

Atom feeds work too — for the article URL, Letterhead reads the href attribute on <link>.

How items are tagged and categorized

Every item Letterhead imports from a feed is labeled automatically, from two different systems, so your library stays filterable without manual work:

• Tags — labels you control. These come from two places, and both are applied as you import:
  • Your default tags — any Tags you set on the feed are applied to every new item from it (see auto-tagging new feed items).
  • The feed’s own categories — if a feed includes categories on its items (the <category> labels a publisher attaches to each entry), Letterhead reads them and applies them as tags on the imported item, on top of your default tags. Any category that already matches one of your default tags is skipped (so you don’t get duplicates), and any tag that doesn’t exist yet is created for you. These behave like any other tag — you can edit or remove them on individual items.
• IAB categories — labels Letterhead applies for you. Separately from tags, every item is auto-assigned an industry-standard IAB category by a fixed, rule-based engine. IAB categories can’t be created or edited; see automatic IAB categorization.

You can filter your Curations library by tags or by IAB categories.

How Letterhead keeps feeds fresh

Letterhead automatically checks each feed for new content on a regular schedule, every few minutes. When a check fails for a temporary reason — a timeout, a rate limit, or a brief outage at the source — Letterhead keeps retrying, up to 15 consecutive times, before marking the feed invalid and showing the last error it received. A hard failure — a feed URL that no longer exists or returns a permanent error — marks the feed invalid right away. An invalid feed isn’t checked again until you revalidate it; see revalidating an RSS feed.

A few behaviors worth knowing:

• Duplicates are filtered — Letterhead detects items it has already curated so your library stays clean; see how duplicate detection works.
• Updated publish dates repull the story — if you change an article’s publication date at the source, Letterhead refreshes the story in your library with the new date, so story order stays correct.
• Tag inline — you can add or create tags for any curated item directly in the library table, without opening the item.

Reset a feed

Resetting makes Letterhead treat the feed as brand new and re-curate every item in it — regardless of how old the items are or whether they’ve already appeared in past newsletters. This is useful when a feed was broken or incomplete, its structure changed, or you need older content reprocessed. Large feeds can take a while to finish, and previously published items may reappear, so Letterhead asks you to confirm before resetting.

Prefer to work in conversation?

The Letterhead assistant (early access — rolling out to select accounts) can browse your curated content in conversation — for example, “show me my latest curations.” See how the assistant works.