Focus Reader Team
Email newsletters are a valuable source of curated information, but subscribing to them clutters the inbox and mixes long-form reading content with actionable correspondence.
Core trick
Assigns each newsletter subscription a unique pseudo email address and parses incoming mail into sanitized HTML and Markdown.
Tags
Description
Email newsletters are a valuable source of curated information, but subscribing to them clutters the inbox and mixes long-form reading content with actionable correspondence. There is no clean separation between "things to read" and "things to act on" in a typical email workflow.
Focus Reader is a self-hosted system that provides a dedicated ingestion pipeline for email newsletters using pseudo email addresses, converts them into clean readable formats (HTML and Markdown), and presents them in an RSS-reader-like interface with support for tagging, categorization, and search.
- Eliminate newsletter clutter from the user's primary inbox.
- Provide a dedicated, distraction-free reading experience for newsletters.
- Allow the user to generate unlimited pseudo email addresses for subscriptions.
- Support an existing tagging/categorization system for organizing content.
- Optionally expose ingested newsletters as RSS/Atom feeds for interoperability with other readers.
README excerpt
# Focus Reader An open-source read-it-later application that unifies web articles, email newsletters, RSS feeds, PDFs, and bookmarks into a single distraction-free reading interface. Deploy to your own Cloudflare account in single-user mode, or run as a multi-tenant SaaS — you own your data. ## Features - **Email newsletter ingestion** — Subscribe to newsletters with per-subscription pseudo email addresses (`techweekly@read.yourdomain.com`). Emails are parsed, sanitized, and stored automatically. - **RSS feed aggregation** — Add RSS/Atom feeds and automatically ingest new articles on a schedule. - **Asynchronous enrichment queue** — Low-quality extractions and cover image caching are processed via Cloudflare Queues. - **Browser extension** — Save bookmarks and full-page content from Chrome with one click. - **PDF upload** — Upload PDFs (up to 50 MB) stored in R2 with inline viewing. - **Full-text search** — Search across all documents via D1 FTS5. - **Saved views** — Create filtered views by type, tag, read status, and date range. - **HTML sanitization** — Strips tracking pixels, scripts, and unsafe content while preserving layout and images. - **Markdown conversion** — All content stored as Markdown for portability and easy export. - **Deduplication** — Prevents duplicate documents via Message-ID and SHA-256 fingerprint matching. - **CID image support** — Inline email images uploaded to R2 and served via proxy URLs. - **Tagging & organization** — Tag feeds, subscriptions,