RSS to Email Digest in 30 Minutes

The build: a daily 7 AM email with the 5-8 most interesting articles from your curated RSS feeds, AI-summarized in your preferred tone, filtered to skip the noise.

Total build time: 30 minutes.

What you'll need

• -A list of RSS feeds you actually want to read (Hacker News, your favorite blogs, Substack writers, etc.)
• -n8n
• -AI API key
• -Email tool (Resend, Gmail)

Step 1: Cron trigger (1 min)

n8n cron, daily at 6:30 AM.

Step 2: Fetch feeds (10 min)

Add an RSS Feed Read node for each feed you follow. Limit each to last 24 hours.

If you have many feeds, batch them with HTTP Request nodes pointing to each feed URL, then parse the XML in a Code node.

Aggregate all items into a single list with: title, link, source, published_at, summary (from the RSS feed itself).

Step 3: Score for relevance (8 min)

Add an AI node:

``` Score each article for inclusion in a daily digest.

My interests: {YOUR_TOPICS_LIST, e.g., "AI engineering, small business automation, founder stories, security incidents"} My anti-interests: {THINGS_TO_FILTER_OUT, e.g., "VC drama, celebrity tech, cryptocurrency hype, generic listicles"}

Articles: {{ articles_json }}

For each article, return: { "url": <article url>, "score": <0-10>, "reason": <one sentence why> }

Score 7+ means include in digest. Score 4-6 means borderline. Score 0-3 means skip.

Be opinionated. Skip clickbait. Skip rehashes of news from yesterday. Skip articles that are basically ads. ```

Step 4: Filter and limit (3 min)

Code node. Filter for score >= 7. Sort by score descending. Take top 8.

Step 5: AI summarize each (5 min)

For each filtered article, AI summarize:

``` Write a 2-3 sentence summary of this article for a daily digest.

Title: {{ title }} Source: {{ source }} URL: {{ url }} Original summary: {{ rss_summary }}

Voice: direct, opinionated, peer-to-peer. NOT corporate. NOT hyped.

If the article is a "how to" — say what the how-to teaches in one sentence and who should care. If the article is news — say what happened and what changed. If the article is opinion — say the take and whether it's contrarian.

Skip filler. Skip "in this article, the author argues that". Just say what the article says.

End with: "[Read at {{ source }} →]({{ url }})" ```

Step 6: Compose email (3 min)

Combine the summaries into a single email body. Add a header with the date.

Email node. Send to yourself.

Common gotchas

• -Some RSS feeds rate-limit. Cache the previous day's response and only fetch new items.
• -AI relevance scoring can be too conservative. Re-tune the prompt over a week — show it your favorites and your skips.
• -The summaries occasionally over-promise on news that's actually old. Add a recency check (skip articles older than 48 hours).

What I do with this

I read the email over coffee. 10-15 minutes max. I no longer doom-scroll Twitter for news. I no longer have 14 newsletter subscriptions cluttering my inbox.

The system filters more than 90% of the noise. What's left is the stuff I'd have wanted to read anyway.

What to add next

• -Add Hacker News and Reddit as sources (their RSS feeds work)
• -Multi-category breakdown (AI section, business section, builds section)
• -Weekly Saturday version with longer reads
• -Bookmark-to-read-later integration (Pocket, Readwise, Instapaper)

Don't add until the basic version proves itself in week one. Most people quit reading curated digests by week three. Make sure you're still reading before you over-engineer.