How do I use the RSS block?

An RSS feed gives Letterhead a standardized, computer-readable view of a website’s updates. The RSS block pulls those articles into your newsletter edition automatically, which makes it a natural fit for automated publishing. You can filter what it pulls by source (the feed’s title), published dates, or keywords, and customize how articles display.

If you only want to share one or two specific articles, use the URL block instead — a feed can update between when you compose and when you send.

Before you start

• Validate your feed with the W3C Feed Validator. If it passes, it should work in Letterhead. If a feed you don’t control fails, you’ll need to contact its publisher.
• Safelist Letterhead’s crawler on your site so feeds load reliably: *.tryletterhead.com, letterhead.email, and letterhead.ai. The crawler is labeled LetterheadCurationBot, user-agent Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LetterheadCurationBot/1.0; +http://tryletterhead.com/bots).
• Feeds are fetched live. Letterhead doesn’t cache feeds — it fetches them at the moment of preview. If a previously working feed comes in empty, the feed server itself (WordPress commonly does this) may be serving Letterhead a cached version. Letterhead has a workaround, but if it keeps happening, contact the feed owner or Letterhead support.

Add the RSS feed as a source

1. Go to Emails → Curations → Sources and click Add content.
2. Enter a title, description, and the feed URL.
3. Decide whether to enable Crawl feed. If the feed is for the RSS block, it’s best to leave this off — Letterhead pulls content from the feed every 15 minutes either way.
4. Leave Advanced feed crawling disabled (recommended). Enabled, Letterhead ignores the feed contents and instead fetches each item’s <link> URL directly, like the URL block does — and not every site allows crawling.
5. Under Automatically Delete Old Curations, choose a timeframe, or Never to keep items indefinitely.
6. Click Add feed.

With crawling enabled, bot traffic on your site increases significantly and your site must allow our crawler; you can shape what gets curated using Open Graph tags. Letterhead cannot crawl paywalled or login-required sites, including social media.

Set up the RSS block in the composer

1. Open your newsletter draft or template and drag in the RSS block.
2. Select your feed/source.
3. Pick the timeframe to pull articles from. The default is exact dates; for automations, choose All days or another rolling option.
4. Set Items to show (up to 10 articles with the Heading and excerpt or Heading, excerpt and image layouts) and Skip items (an offset of 0 starts at the first article; 1 starts at the second).
5. Click Load to pull in the articles (available in newsletter drafts, not templates).

Layout options

• Heading, excerpt and image — left image/right text, right image/left text, or large image above text. Images come from the feed’s <media:content> node, falling back to <media:thumbnail>. Note: if <media:content> is present but empty or invalid, the thumbnail fallback may not trigger.
• Heading and excerpt — text only.
• Full content — the entire article, pulled from <content:encoded>. If this comes up empty, your feed likely lacks that node. Because full articles are long, expect only 1–3 items with this layout so the email stays a deliverable size.

All multi-column blocks (RSS, Curation, URL, and Layout) include a setting for how columns behave on small screens — for example, stacking an image-left/text-right row vertically on mobile.

A note on images

Images are pulled automatically from your feed’s image nodes, so what displays depends on how the feed is structured. If images aren’t showing up, see Ensuring Your Images Appear in the RSS Composer Block.

Display options

Toggle what each item shows, and where the data comes from in your feed:

• Title — from <title> in each <item>.
• Excerpt — from <description> (or <content> if empty); Letterhead uses the first sentence. The article link comes from <link>.
• Date published — from <pubDate>.
• Source — the feed’s title.
• Author — from <dc:creator>.

You can also adjust column width and image settings, and style the block (background, border, and more) with the shared block settings — see How do I use the new design settings?

Duplicate items

Letterhead treats items as the same when the <title>, <link>, and <pubDate> day all match. If any of those differ — even title casing, a new date, or a changed URL — or the item arrives via a different feed, it’s inserted as a separate entry.

Dynamic email subjects in automations

When the RSS block is used in an automation, the email subject can be set dynamically:

1. Letterhead scans the newsletter for the first heading (H1–H6) and uses it as the subject.
2. If none is found, it uses the first bold title in your RSS blocks (any layout except full content).
3. Long titles are trimmed to the last complete word with an ellipsis, capped at 150 characters.

Seeing feed errors? See Understanding RSS Feed Errors in Letterhead. Still stuck? Submit a support ticket with as much detail as possible. For everything else the composer can do, see Working in Emails.