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Revalidating your RSS feed in Letterhead

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Letterhead automatically crawls each RSS feed you add, retrying failed checks up to five times in a row. After five consecutive errors, the feed is marked invalid, Letterhead stops checking it, and your channel admins get an email with the error reason and suggested fixes. Once you’ve fixed the root cause, revalidate the feed to start it up again.

Common errors and how to fix them

Section titled “Common errors and how to fix them”
  • Unable to pull content — the feed returned no items. Open the feed URL in a browser and confirm it’s valid XML with a <channel> and at least one <item>; run it through the W3C Feed Validator to catch formatting issues; publish new items, then revalidate.
  • Unable to access feed — the crawler can’t reach the URL. Verify the URL loads in your browser, safelist *.tryletterhead.com, letterhead.email, and letterhead.ai on your server, and make sure it accepts the LetterheadCurationBot user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LetterheadCurationBot/1.0; +http://tryletterhead.com/bots).
  • Too many requests — the feed is rate-limiting Letterhead. Ask your feed admin to relax throttling, then wait a few minutes before revalidating.
  • An unexpected feed error occurred — an internal issue on Letterhead’s side. Wait 30–60 minutes and try again; contact support if it persists.
  • Service unavailable — the feed’s server is offline or overloaded. Confirm the source is up and retry later.
  • Bad gateway — the feed’s server returned an invalid response. Retry after a short interval, or contact your feed provider if it continues.

Make sure the root cause is fully resolved before revalidating — otherwise the feed will just fail again.

Revalidate the feed

Section titled “Revalidate the feed”
  1. Open Curations and go to the RSS Feeds tab — it gathers every feed in one place, so quiet or invalid feeds are easy to spot.
  2. Find the feed marked Invalid and click Revalidate.
  3. If the issue is resolved, the status flips back to Valid.

If the feed keeps failing after a successful revalidation, or you need Letterhead to reprocess its whole history, consider resetting the feed instead.

Still can’t find what you need? Contact support.