You subscribed to four newsletters that looked good. A year later, twenty-something land in your primary inbox every week, and the ones you actually want to read are buried under shipping receipts and calendar invites.
Two readers usually end up here. Someone with too many newsletter subscriptions who wants them out of the inbox without losing them. And someone who wants to subscribe to Substack writers without giving Substack their main email address. The good answers split a little, depending which one you are.
What "out of my inbox" actually means
Three different things, and they pull toward different tools.
- Out of the primary tab, but still in Gmail. A label, a filter, a Gmail alias. No new app.
- Out of email entirely, into a reading interface. A dedicated reader, or a read-later library that accepts email forwards.
- Out of email, into a feed reader. Newsletters become RSS so they sit alongside the blogs you already follow.
Pick the one that matches how you want to read, then pick the tool. If you skip step one, you end up running two of these at once and reading newsletters in neither.
A Gmail alias is the cheapest fix
If your only goal is "stop them landing in my primary tab", you do not need a new app. Gmail's plus addressing handles it.
When you subscribe to a newsletter, sign up as yourname+news@gmail.com. Mail still arrives at your normal address, but it now carries a tag Gmail can filter on. Then build one filter that catches anything sent to the +news alias, applies a label, and skips the inbox. Gmail's plus-addressing docs cover the alias side, and Gmail's filter docs cover the rule side.
The result is a news label that fills up quietly. You open it when you want to read, and your primary inbox stays clean.
This is enough for a lot of people. It does not give you anything Gmail does not already give you. Search is fine, threading is fine, mobile works. The downside is that the reading interface is still Gmail, with HTML quirks, occasional tracking pixels, and the same app you use for actual work. If newsletters feel like obligation in Gmail, moving them five inches to the left does not change that.
A second Gmail account works the same way and gives you a sharper separation, at the cost of one more password and inbox to check. Use the alias unless you genuinely want a different login.
A separate reader app, when Gmail is the problem
If newsletters feel like obligation in Gmail, take them out of email entirely.
HEY, if you want a polished email-side answer
HEY splits incoming mail into three places: the regular inbox, the Paper Trail (receipts), and The Feed, a scrollable view of newsletters with everything pre-opened. You decide which senders go where. Once a newsletter is routed to The Feed, it never touches the inbox again.
HEY personal is $99 a year, which is the most expensive option in this list and also the only one where newsletters live inside a real email service. You get a @hey.com address and a paid app. If you already wanted to leave Gmail and the newsletter pile is the last reason you have not, HEY is a clean exit.
Meco, if newsletters are the whole job
Meco is a free reader app built for newsletters specifically. You either connect Gmail and let Meco pull newsletters out of your existing inbox, or you subscribe with a Meco-issued address. Newsletters land in groups, you can save individual posts, and the app does AI summaries and audio briefings if you want them.
Meco asks you to use a single-purpose app for one category of reading. If your reading is mostly newsletters, that is exactly what you want. If newsletters are one of five things you save, a wider library tool fits better.
Substack's own reader, if half your list is on Substack
Substack's reader is the right home for Substack-heavy readers. Open the app or the web reader, sign in, and every Substack you subscribe to (free or paid) lands there with a clean reading view, comments, and notes. You can subscribe with the email address tied to your Substack account, and posts will appear in the reader regardless of whether email delivery is on.
The reader only covers Substack. ButtonDown, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, and a hundred independent newsletters keep going to wherever else you sent them. For a reader who has drifted entirely onto Substack, that is fine. For anyone with a mixed subscription list, it solves half the problem.
If you specifically do not want Substack to have your primary email address, create a free Substack account with a throwaway address (a Gmail alias works), subscribe through the platform, and read everything inside the Substack app. Your real address never touches their database, and you still get every post.
Keep, if newsletters are part of a wider read-later library
Keep gives you a personal k-...@in.keep.md address. Forward newsletters to it, or subscribe to newsletters with it directly, and each issue arrives in your library as clean markdown alongside your articles, X bookmarks, Kindle highlights, and YouTube saves. Search runs across the full body of every issue, the same way it does for the rest of your library.
This is the right shape when newsletters are one of several formats you save. The same library that holds last week's Stratechery essay also holds the article you saved from Hacker News this morning, the X thread you bookmarked at lunch, and the Kindle highlight you flagged on a flight in March. One search, one place, all in markdown that survives any future export. The setup lives in the Keep email docs, including the Gmail auto-forward rule that bridges newsletters from your existing inbox without touching the subscription itself.
What Keep does not do is highlight-first review. There is no daily review queue, no spaced repetition, no per-passage flashcards. If your relationship with newsletters is "I want to highlight three lines from each one and revisit them on a schedule", a highlight-first reader is sharper.
Readwise Reader, if highlights are how you read
Readwise Reader accepts newsletters via a personal forwarding address, the same way it accepts articles, PDFs, and YouTube transcripts. The daily review email pulls highlighted passages back in front of you on a spaced schedule, which is the part nothing else on this list does as well. Reader is part of the Readwise Full plan at $9.99 a month billed annually, or $12.99 monthly.
Readwise sits next to Keep in this list because both are wider read-later libraries. Reader wins if newsletters are research-shaped and you want passage-level review. Keep wins if you want one library that covers articles, newsletters, X, Kindle, and YouTube, with the full text of every save in plain markdown you can leave with at any time.
Matter, if you want a clean reading interface and free is fine
Matter is a polished reader with a newsletter inbox, Gmail-import support, and a clean iOS app. It accepts subscriptions either by giving the writer your Matter address or by connecting Gmail and letting Matter pull newsletters out automatically.
For a reader who wants a single iOS-first app that handles articles and newsletters together with no setup, it does the job.
Newsletter to RSS, if you live in a feed reader already
Some readers do not want another inbox at all. They want every newsletter to show up in the same RSS reader they already check every morning, next to the blogs and feeds they already follow. There is a working bridge for that.
Kill the Newsletter generates a unique email address and an Atom feed. Subscribe to a newsletter using that address, and every issue becomes a feed entry your reader can pick up. It is open source, free, and run by one person. Atom is close enough to RSS that every modern feed reader handles it.
This works best when you are starting clean with a new feed reader and you want the discipline of one place to read everything. It is less useful as a layer on top of an existing inbox, because you end up checking both. Pair it with one of the free RSS readers worth trying and the bridge holds up. If you have not picked a reader yet, how to find a feed for any site covers the wider feed-finding problem newsletters are only one corner of.
Picking one, by what your subscription list actually looks like
Five readers, five honest leads.
- Mostly Substack writers. Use Substack's own reader, with a throwaway address if you do not want them to have your primary email.
- Newsletters are most of what you read across many platforms. Try Meco first.
- Newsletters are part of a wider library that includes articles, X, Kindle, and YouTube. Use Keep's email inbox.
- Highlights and spaced review are the point. Use Readwise Reader.
- You already live in a feed reader and want everything there. Use Kill the Newsletter to bridge each subscription into your existing setup.
If none of those is obviously you, the cheapest first move is the Gmail alias. It costs nothing, takes ten minutes, and gives you a clean primary inbox while you figure out whether you want a real reading app on top.
Setting up the Keep version, if that is the lead you picked
Keep gives you one personal address per account. The setup is short.
- Open settings, subscriptions and add an email inbox source.
- Copy your
k-...@in.keep.mdaddress. - Use it as the subscription address for any newsletter going forward, or set up a Gmail filter that forwards specific senders to it from your existing inbox.
Confirmation emails are detected and the source shows as "pending confirmation" until you click the link. Substack uses a 6-digit verification code, and the email docs cover that path step by step. From there, every issue lands in the same library as the rest of your saves, full-text searchable from day one.
Set up your Keep email inbox when you want newsletters to read like the rest of your library.