Turn any RSS or Atom feed into a reading queue. PostRSS saves every new item to your Instapaper account automatically — stripped to clean text, synced to every device, and waiting for you offline.
Every other destination PostRSS supports is a way of publishing. You connect an account, and your content goes out to people who follow you. Instapaper inverts that completely.
Instapaper is a read-later service. Articles saved to it are stripped of navigation, advertising, pop-ups and newsletter prompts, reduced to text and images, and synced to every device you use. Nothing is broadcast. Nobody sees your queue. It is a private library that fills itself.
So instead of taking your own feed and sending it to an audience, this Target takes other people’s feeds — or your own, if you want an archive — and delivers them to you. The automation is pointed inward.
That makes it the most useful Target on the list for a specific and very common problem: keeping up with reading you have decided matters, without either living in a feed reader or quietly abandoning the habit after three weeks.
Two things are needed: an Instapaper account to save into, and a feed to watch. In PostRSS the account is a Target and each saved article counts as one Task against your plan’s monthly allowance.
Add Instapaper in PostRSS and authorise the account you want articles saved to. Access can be withdrawn at any time from your Instapaper account, which stops saving immediately.
Only one account is needed. If you keep separate personal and work accounts, connect each as its own Target and point different feeds at each.
This is the step that differs from every other page in this series. The feed does not have to be yours.
Almost every publication still emits one, even when it is not advertised. WordPress sites expose /feed/ and a feed for every category and tag. Ghost, Substack and Medium publish them by default. News sites almost always have one per section. Every podcast is a feed by definition, and every YouTube channel has one keyed to its channel ID. If you cannot find a link, open the homepage source and look for application/rss+xml.
Skipping this is the most common way an Instapaper automation fails. A large publication’s main feed can produce forty items a day, and forty unread articles a day is not a reading queue — it is a source of guilt. Filters are covered properly below.
PostRSS checks each feed every 5 minutes on every plan, and every 1 minute on Enterprise. New items are saved to your account as they appear, ready on whichever device you pick up next.
PostRSS sends the article’s URL to Instapaper, and Instapaper does what it does best: fetches the page, extracts the article text and images, discards everything else, and stores a clean, readable version.
That extraction is the value. A news article that is unreadable on a phone because of three overlays and an autoplaying video becomes plain text with pictures. It also means saved articles work offline, which is the single most underrated feature of the whole category — a flight, a commute or a dead zone stops being lost time.
Extraction is not perfect. Sites that render article text in JavaScript, or sit behind a hard paywall, may save as a title and a stub. That is a property of the source page rather than of the automation, and the usual workaround is to follow a feed that carries full content where the publisher offers one.
On a publishing Target, filters protect your audience. Here they protect you, and the stakes are more personal.
PostRSS applies filters before anything is saved. You can restrict a feed by category or tag, require a keyword in the title, or exclude one. Applied well, this turns an unusable firehose into a short, genuinely interesting queue.
Three patterns cover most needs. Section filtering takes one part of a large publication — the technology section of a national paper rather than the whole paper. Keyword filtering tracks a subject across a broad feed, which is how you follow one topic through a general news source. Exclusion removes the recurring formats you never read: live blogs, horoscopes, sponsored content, match reports.
A good target is five to fifteen saved articles a week per feed. Below that you will stop opening the app; far above it and you will start ignoring the queue, which amounts to the same thing.
Follow the blogs of the companies you compete with, filtered to product and announcement categories. You see what they ship without visiting their sites, and without a subscription to a monitoring tool that costs more than your whole automation bill.
Point several academic, technical or trade feeds at one account with tight keyword filters, and a reading list on your subject assembles itself. Instapaper’s highlights and notes then let you mark the parts worth returning to.
Many sites expose per-author feeds — on WordPress, /author/name/feed/. Following three writers you genuinely rate produces a better queue than following the six publications they write for.
Because everything is stored locally once synced, a queue built over a fortnight is a book’s worth of reading that needs no connection. For anyone who travels regularly this alone justifies the setup.
Pointing your own feed at Instapaper gives you a personal, readable archive of everything you publish — occasionally useful, and a good way to see how your articles read when stripped of your own design.
One shared account, several filtered feeds, and a team has a common reading list without anyone maintaining it by hand.
Instapaper lets you organise saved articles into folders, and once you are following more than two or three feeds this stops being optional.
The arrangement that works is one folder per purpose rather than one per source: Competitors, Research, Industry, Long reads. You then read by intent — twenty minutes on competitors before a planning meeting — instead of scrolling a single undifferentiated list.
Running several Targets, each with its own feed and filter set, is what makes this possible. It costs nothing extra beyond the Targets your plan allows.
Instapaper is the one destination where instant delivery carries no social cost. Nobody is notified, no timeline is flooded, and a burst of five saved articles at three in the morning bothers no one.
Scheduling still has a use, though a different one. If you prefer your queue to arrive as a batch — everything from the last day appearing in one go rather than trickling in — a publishing window produces exactly that, and some people find a once-daily delivery easier to treat as a finite thing to work through.
The more important control is simply the filter. Volume you cannot read is the only real failure mode here.
A fair question: why not just use an RSS reader?
A reader shows you everything and expects you to triage. That is the right tool when you want to survey a field, and the wrong one when you want to read. Most people’s readers accumulate thousands of unread items and become something to avoid.
This setup does the triage in advance. The filter decides what is worth your attention, and what arrives is already the shortlist — in a reading app built for reading rather than for scanning, with offline support, adjustable typography and highlights.
The two are not exclusive. Plenty of people keep a reader for browsing and run PostRSS into Instapaper for the handful of sources they genuinely intend to read.
Check that the Instapaper connection is still authorised. Access can be withdrawn from your Instapaper account, and if that happened saving stops even though feeds are still being checked. Also confirm the source feed actually updated.
That is a filter behaving as configured. Review the category, tag and keyword rules on the Target — and remember that on this Target a strict filter is usually deliberate.
The source page is either rendering its article in JavaScript or sitting behind a paywall, so Instapaper’s extraction has nothing to take. Follow a full-content feed where one exists, or accept the title and link.
The filter is too loose. Tighten it to a category or a keyword rather than trying to read faster.
Compare timestamps. Under five minutes is the feed-check interval working as designed. Hours usually means the publisher’s feed is cached — and on someone else’s site, that is outside your control.
Each Instapaper account you connect is one Target, and each saved article is one Task against your plan’s monthly allowance. Paid plans raise both numbers and add the other networks, and they are chosen on postrss.com rather than inside the mobile app.
Because a well-filtered reading queue is deliberately small, this tends to be one of the cheapest Targets to run: six feeds producing two articles a week each costs around fifty Tasks a month.
This is the only inward-facing destination PostRSS offers, but it is not the only quiet one. Slack and Microsoft Teams serve the same purpose for a team rather than a person, and a webhook into Zapier, n8n or Make can file the same articles into a spreadsheet or database instead of a reading app.
Whether a source is worth following at all usually comes down to what its feed carries — how many items a feed exposes decides how much of a publication you actually receive, and a feed that stops updating is the commonest reason a queue goes quiet.
No. Instapaper is a private read-later account. Saved articles are visible only to you.
Yes, and that is the main use. Any public RSS or Atom feed can be pointed at your Instapaper account.
Instapaper extracts the article from the page, so in most cases yes. Pages that render text in JavaScript or sit behind a paywall may save with little or no body text.
Yes. Once synced to a device, articles are stored locally and need no connection.
Run a separate Target per folder’s worth of sources, each with its own feed and filters, and organise from there.
Pause the Target in PostRSS, or withdraw access from your Instapaper account. Either stops saving immediately.
Pick the single source you most often mean to read and least often actually do. Point it at your account with a filter narrow enough that fewer than ten articles a week get through. Read for a fortnight, then add a second. A reading queue that stays short is one you keep using — and that is the only measure that matters here.
