Read newsletters as an edition

Reading is where newsletters, digests and posts you subscribed to land. It is a front page you visit when you like, not a pile you owe: there is no unread count, the sources you read most come first, and items fade on their own unless you keep them.

The unit is a readable item, not an email:

The email	What Reading shows
One essay	One item: its headline, source, minutes and first paragraph
A digest of links	The issue, with each link as its own item and blurb
A teaser (“New post… Read more”)	The article it points at
A short notice	One line

Headlines lose the newsletter’s own boilerplate (“[AINews]”, “Issue #42 |”, the source’s name, emoji). The first paragraph skips the “View in browser” line, the greeting and the sponsor. All of this is rules on your machine; no model reads your newsletters.

Open the edition

In the web app pick Reading in the rail or press g r; in the TUI it is Reading in the sidebar, also g r. From the command line:

mxr reading

EDITION_OUTPUT

The edition has three bands:

• Since you were last here: what arrived after your previous visit in that account. A visit ends after half an hour away, so “since you were last here” stays put while you read. No visit is recorded while MXR_ACTIVITY=off or activity is paused.
• Earlier this week: still inside its source’s window.
• Fading: in its last day.

A “You left off here” line sits between what’s new and what you’ve seen. Inside a band, the sources you finish most come first; a source with three issues or fewer keeps one of the lead slots, so a new subscription is never buried.

mxr reading edition --peek looks without counting as a visit, which is what an agent or a script should use. Every item carries its key (<message id>:<index>); --format json prints the whole edition and --format ids just the keys.

Each source fades on its own clock

An item stays for twice its source’s usual gap between issues, between 2 and 14 days: a daily lasts two days, a weekly a fortnight. A source with one issue so far gets a week. In its last day it moves to Fading, and then it is done in Reading.

Fading is local. The email stays in your inbox and in search; mxr never archives it at Gmail or your mail server because an item faded. When no other mode holds it, it is simply out of every mode. mxr reading sources lists each source’s window:

mxr reading sources

SOURCES_OUTPUT

Read in the reader

Press Enter on an item, or from the command line:

mxr reading open ITEM

The reader is a single column about 66 characters wide, the width a book uses, with the time left at your pace and a thin progress line. The masthead, share buttons and footer are gone. R switches to the sender’s own layout and remembers it for that source, for the newsletters whose design is the point.

Minutes start at 230 words a minute. Once you have read three issues to the end, mxr uses your own pace instead, measured from them and clamped so a tab left open overnight can’t skew it.

Fetch the linked article, only when you ask

A digest link or a teaser points at an article on someone else’s site. The reader’s Article tab, L, or mxr reading open ITEM --article fetches it, and nothing else ever does. The client names the site before it contacts it (“Fetching from sqlite.org”), because the fetch tells that site you clicked. Many newsletter links go through a click tracker; those show “via substack.com” until the article is fetched, and the reader then lists every site that was contacted.

The fetch goes through the daemon with the same guards as a remote model endpoint:

• web links only, with tracking parameters (utm_*, fbclid, mc_eid and the like) stripped;
• never this machine or a private network: localhost, .local and .internal names are refused, and so is any name that resolves to a private, loopback or link-local address;
• the connection goes to the address that was checked, so a DNS answer can’t change in between, and no system proxy is used;
• each redirect is checked like the first link, at most five of them;
• HTML only, at most 5 MB.

The article is saved, so it reads offline afterwards. A paywall or a page that needs a browser comes back as a short reason with the link to open it yourself.

Keep things on Later

b puts an item on Later, the one shelf in Reading with a count. Putting a link on Later also fetches its article, so it is there on a plane. Later never fades. Something on it for more than 30 days asks once, “Still want it?”, and keeping it stops the question.

mxr reading later --add ITEM --dry-run
mxr reading later --add ITEM
mxr reading later
mxr reading later --remove ITEM

Let go

e lets go of an item: it is done in Reading. When no other mode holds the email, it is archived at your provider, the toast says so, and u undoes it. This is the same done as every mode (Email is five apps).

A lets go of everything in the edition. It always shows the list first, and what it lets go of is exactly that list:

mxr reading let-go --all --dry-run
mxr reading let-go --all

Unsubscribe with evidence

D opens an unsubscribe preview for the item’s source with the evidence: “You opened 0 of the last 11 issues”. It says how the source is left (one click, where the sender is told directly, or a page you have to open) and that it can’t be undone from mxr: you would resubscribe on their site. It runs the existing unsubscribe with its dry run first.

When a source has sent eight or more issues and you opened none of them, its items carry a quiet “Unsubscribe?” offer. Dismiss it and it doesn’t come back for that source.

The counts only cover what mxr saw: issues that arrived after you first opened Reading, and opens in mxr. mxr doesn’t use your provider’s read flag, because letting go marks mail read there and would count a skipped issue as opened.

Highlight what you want to keep

Select text in the reader and press h (the TUI saves the paragraph at the top of the reader). Highlights are found by search and exported as Markdown, grouped by item with the source and the link:

mxr reading highlight ITEM "A delete is the absence of a row" --note "for the talk"
mxr reading export --markdown > reading-highlights.md

Highlights are stored with the email they came from. Deleting the email deletes them, so export what you want to keep elsewhere.

What it learns about you, and how to turn it off

To rank sources and back the unsubscribe evidence, Reading keeps a little local engagement for each item: that you opened it, the seconds you spent, how far you scrolled and whether you finished. It never leaves your machine. MXR_ACTIVITY=off turns it off together with the activity log; Reading then ranks by recency and makes no unsubscribe offers.

Keys

Key	What it does
Enter	Read
L	Fetch the linked article
b	Later
e	Let go
D	Unsubscribe, with evidence and a preview
R	The sender’s own layout
A	Let go of everything shown, with a preview
h	Highlight the selection
o	Open the email itself
?	Help, starting with Reading

On a phone, swipe a card right to put it on Later and left to let it go.

The old grouping by sender is still there: mxr reading senders.