Feed fetcher

Readzee is asking for your feed

Readzee is a personal RSS reader. If you have found us in your logs, one of your readers subscribed to your feed here and we are collecting it on their behalf.

How to recognise us

Every request we make carries this User-Agent:

A small number of hosts reject that header outright, and for those we send an ordinary browser User-Agent instead so that our readers' subscriptions keep working. If yours is one of them and you would rather we did not, tell us and we will take it off that list.

What we do, and what we don't

• We fetch feed URLs that a Readzee reader has subscribed to. Nothing else on your site is requested.
• We do not crawl, and we do not follow links out of your articles.
• The one page we ever read is the one a reader pastes in to subscribe: we fetch it once, look for the feed links declared in its <head>, and then only ever ask for the feed.
• Because we fetch only what someone asked for and never crawl, we do not consult robots.txt. Email us instead and we will stop.

How often we ask

Each feed is on its own schedule, learned from how often it actually publishes, so a quiet feed is left alone and a busy one is checked more nearly in step with it.

At most

once every 15 minutes per feed

At least

once every 24 hours — where a feed that has stopped publishing ends up

To start with

every 30 minutes, until there is enough history to judge the cadence

Per server

one request at a time, at least 10 seconds apart, however many of your feeds our readers follow

We send If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since whenever you have given us an ETag or a Last-Modified, so an unchanged feed costs you a 304 and no body at all. Each request is given 20 seconds and we stop reading after 5 MB.

How we back off

• A 429 or 503 pauses every feed we hold on your server, not just the one that saw it.
• If you send Retry-After we wait exactly that long, up to a day. Without one, we leave the whole server alone for 15 minutes.
• A feed that keeps failing is asked for less and less often — doubling each time, up to 7 days between attempts — until it answers again.
• After 30 days of answering nothing at all, we stop asking on a schedule altogether and look roughly once every 30 days. If the feed comes back, so do we.

Get in touch

To have a feed dropped, to ask about anything above, or if we are getting something wrong, email hello@readzee.com and a person will read it.

See what Readzee does