I Want Instapaper for Newsletters

Instapaper is one of those apps I use every day. My email inbox often includes links to "must-read" articles recommended by others and I rarely have time to read them immediately. Instapaper lets me read them later on whatever device I have in front of me.

I'm noticing a similar problem with newsletters. I subscribe to a bunch of them and I don't always have the time to read all the interesting links they point to. I can open each link and quickly send it to Instapaper but even that starts to become time-consuming, especially if the newsletter has 5, 10 or more links.

So here's a great business opportunity for Instapaper (or for someone else who wants to connect it to Instapaper). It starts by me providing the following:

1. My Instapaper credentials.
2. A list of all the newsletters I subscribe to.

In return, this service will do the following:

1. Sign up to receive all the same newsletters.
2. As each newsletter issue arrives, scan it and push the blog posts, articles, etc., it contains into my Instapaper account. Rather than just dumping all this into the root directory of my account, create folders for each newsletter to improve navigation.

Pretty simple, right? Does something like this already exist and I just haven't discovered it? This would be a big time-savings for me and would also help me avoid missing any interesting articles. I could just do a quick Instapaper sync on my phone, tablet or whatever device I want and know that all those newsletter articles will be there waiting for me, even if I'm heading into a wifi-free zone.

As I said, this isn't something we need to rely on Instapaper to implement. It could easily be a third-party service that connects to Instapaper accounts.

So will someone please create this as soon as possible? It's a service I'd gladly pay for and I'll bet others would too.

Comments

[Peterc]

A less tightly coupled and more flexible alternative would be a service that provides e-mail addresses that process all mails received and add them to your Instapaper account. That way, you'd still subscribe to any e-mail newsletters you like (rather than those the service chooses to support), just using the special e-mail addresses the service gives you.

Within that service, you could hook different e-mail addresses to different folders. So hdyewj38aj+publishing@awesomeservice.com would accept mails and throw them into your Publishing folder, hdyewj38aj+politics@awesomeservice.com to your Politics folder, and so on.

[Joe Wikert]

Great idea, Peterc. Anything that puts the articles in the right folder would work for me.