Help!

What if I don't know the feed URL?

Not to worry, we'll autodetect any available feeds from a website URL, and present you with a list you can choose from.

How often will I get updates?

Blogtrottr provides a variety of schedules for you to choose from:

• Real time - every update gets its own email.
  • Free and No Ads plan - real time for WebSub enabled feeds, or we poll every hour for other feeds.
  • Lite and Full plans - real time - via WebSub, or our Advanced Polling for other feeds.
• 2/4/6/8/12 hourly or daily digests - multiple updates are rolled into a single email.

What is WebSub?

If your feeds support WebSub (previously known as PubSubHubbub or PuSH), then you can expect to get an update within a couple minutes of a new item being posted. Typically email leaves our system with 10 seconds of us being notified - although the internet being what it is, the email may take a bit longer to find its way across the world and into your inbox.

WebSub is a protocol that allows interested parties to be notified almost immediately when new content is added to a feed, rather than having to wait for a periodic check. It's quickly gaining traction, so there's a good chance that some of your favourite feeds already support it.

Can I subscribe to feeds that require a log in?

If the feed supports basic HTTP authentication, then yes - you can embed a username and password into a URL like this: http(s)://username:[email protected]/feedname.xml
This means of course that we'll have these credentials stored in plain text, and while we won't reveal them to anyone it'd be a sensible precaution to use a unique password, and not one that you use on other sites or services.

What tags can I use in my email subjects?

When editing a subscription, you have the option of adding static text or tags to the email subject.

All dates and times are based on your user account timezone setting.

How can I change my email address?

Simply go into your Account Settings page, edit the Email field, and click the Change button. We'll send a confirmation email to the new address - just follow the link within, and the change is complete.

How do I unsubscribe from a feed?

At the bottom of any update email you get should be an unsubscribe link - you can click that to remove a particular subscription.

Or, you can signup for an account using the email address you used previously, and then you can manage all your existing subscriptions through your web browser.

Alternatively, if your email client supports it, you can one-click unsubscribe.

What do you do about dead or broken feeds?

If a URL hasn't returned any valid feed data (e.g it's returning a 404 error, a domain holding page, or something else that isn't a feed) for more than 6 months, we'll consider it dead and remove subscriptions to it from our system.

What are filters?

A busy feed might publish dozens of items a day, but you may only care about certain topics or authors. Filters let you automatically include or exclude items based on their title, body, URL, author, or category - so you only get the updates that matter to you.

To get started, tick the Filter enabled checkbox when creating or editing a subscription.

Rules

A rule is a single condition that checks part of a feed item. Each rule has three parts:

• Field - which part of the item to check:
  • Title - the item's headline
  • Body - the main content of the item
  • URL - the link to the item
  • Author - who wrote the item
  • Category - the categories or tags assigned to the item
• Condition - how to check it:
  • contains - matches if your search term appears anywhere in the field (not case-sensitive)
  • doesn't contain - matches if your search term does not appear in the field
• Value - the text to search for

Groups

Rules are organised into groups. When a group has more than one rule, you choose whether an item must match all of the rules or just any one of them.

If you have more than one group, you also choose whether the item must satisfy all groups or just any one of them. This gives you a lot of flexibility to express exactly what you want.

For most people, a single group with one or two rules is all you need. Add more groups when you want to combine conditions in different ways.

Send me vs Ignore

At the top of the filter you'll see a dropdown with two choices:

• Send me - you'll only receive items that match your rules. Everything else is ignored.
• Ignore - items that match your rules are discarded. You'll receive everything else.

Advanced: pattern matching

For more powerful matching, you can use matches regex and doesn't match regex instead of the simple contains/doesn't contain conditions.

A regular expression (regex) is a special pattern that can match text in flexible ways. Here are some useful examples:

Regex matching is not case-sensitive. If you're not familiar with regular expressions, the contains and doesn't contain conditions will cover most use cases.

Examples

Only get posts about a specific topic

Set the action to Send me, and add one rule: title contains Laravel. You'll only receive items with "Laravel" in the title.

Hide posts from a particular author

Set the action to Ignore, and add one rule: author contains Guest Author. Posts by that author will be filtered out.

Only get posts about Python or Django

Set the action to Send me, and create a group with two rules using match any:

• title contains Python
• title contains Django

You'll receive items that mention either term.

Get posts about Python, but not beginner tutorials

Set the action to Send me, and create a group with two rules using match all:

• title contains Python
• title doesn't contain beginner

You'll receive items that mention Python but not those aimed at beginners.

What does the default webhook JSON payload look like?

When using the JSON webhook type, we send a POST request with a application/json content type and the following structure:

{
  "feed": {
    "title": "Example Feed",
    "description": "A description of the feed",
    "url": "https://example.com/feed.xml"
  },
  "subscription_id": "abc123",
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "Post Title",
      "link": "https://example.com/post",
      "body": "<p>The full post content</p>",
      "date": "2026-01-15T12:00:00+00:00",
      "authors": ["Author Name"],
      "categories": ["Category"],
      "thumbnail": "https://example.com/thumb.jpg"
    }
  ]
}

If you need a custom body format, choose the Form encoded or Raw webhook type instead.

How does the form encoded webhook type work?

When using the Form encoded webhook type, we send one POST request per feed item with a application/x-www-form-urlencoded content type.

You provide a body template using placeholder tags. All tag values are automatically URL-encoded. For example:

title={item_title}&url={item_link}&feed={feed_title}

Available tags: {feed_title}, {feed_description}, {feed_url}, {item_title}, {item_link}, {item_body}, {item_date}

How does the raw webhook type work?

When using the Raw webhook type, we send one POST request per feed item with a text/plain content type.

You provide a body template using placeholder tags. No escaping is applied - tag values are inserted as-is. For example:

New post: {item_title}
Link: {item_link}
Feed: {feed_title}

Available tags: {feed_title}, {feed_description}, {feed_url}, {item_title}, {item_link}, {item_body}, {item_date}

What are they?

By default, all your feed updates are delivered to your main account email address. With additional email addresses, you can route individual subscriptions to any other address you've verified - a work inbox, a personal inbox, a dedicated filtering address, and so on.

Adding an address

Go to Account › Email addresses and enter the address in the field provided. We'll send a verification link to that address - click it to confirm ownership, and the address will become available to use on your subscriptions.

Using an address

When creating or editing a subscription, select one of your confirmed addresses from the Delivery address dropdown. If no additional address is selected, updates are sent to your main account email as normal.

Removing an address

Click Remove next to an address on the Email addresses page. Any subscriptions that were using it will automatically revert to your main account email address.

Autoblogging

Autoblogging is the practice of automatically posting content (usually copied without permission from other sites) to blogs or websites. Due to complaints from content owners about their work being republished, any user accounts detected using Blogtrottr for this purpose will be automatically suspended.

There are many services and software packages out there dedicated to autoblogging; if you still feel that you must do this, please go and use one of them instead.

Company details

Blogtrottr Ltd is a registered UK company, 08447594.

Registered office (please send all technical and support queries to [email protected]):

Blogtrottr Ltd
71-75 Shelton Street
Covent Garden
London
WC2H 9JQ

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Getting in touch

We're always interested in hearing what people think. You can email us at [email protected]

Privacy & email

You can find full details of our privacy policy on our Policies, Terms and Conditions page.