RSS was supposed to be the antidote to algorithmic noise. You choose your sources, you get their content, no recommendation engine decides what you see. In theory, it’s the cleanest information diet imaginable.

In practice, it has developed its own form of bloat. YouTube channels stuff their RSS feeds with Shorts. News aggregators dump twenty articles a day from sources you only half-care about. Your carefully curated feed turns into another thing to scroll past.

We’ve shipped two new features in cji.email’s RSS reader that give you back real control.

Kill YouTube Shorts at the Source

If you follow YouTube channels via RSS, you’ve experienced the Shorts problem. A channel you subscribe to for long-form technical content starts producing 30-second clips, and suddenly your feed is full of them. There’s no native YouTube RSS option to filter them out. Until now, your choices were to unsubscribe from the channel entirely or tolerate the noise.

cji.email now has a “Include YouTube Shorts” toggle in Settings > General > RSS. When you turn it off, the app actively inspects each incoming YouTube entry before it’s written to the local database.

The detection works by performing a HEAD request against the video URL and following redirects. YouTube Shorts have a distinctive URL pattern (/shorts/) that appears after the redirect chain resolves. We also handle the EU SOCS consent cookie transparently, so users in Europe get the same clean filtering behavior without being blocked by consent gates.

The result: Shorts never make it into your database. They don’t appear in your unread count, your feed view, or your search results. Your channel subscriptions stay intact; the noise doesn’t.

Pause Feeds and Groups Without Deleting Them

The second new feature addresses a different kind of overload: the need to temporarily step back from a source without losing your subscription.

Maybe you’re on a deadline and a particular news feed is too distracting. Maybe you want to take a break from a category of content for a week. Maybe an RSS feed has gone through a rough patch of quality and you want to wait it out. Previously, your only options were to delete the feed (and lose your place) or mute your notifications globally.

Now there’s a power toggle directly in the RSS sidebar. You can pause individual feeds or entire feed groups with a single click.

When a feed is paused:

  • It’s completely skipped during background syncs — no network requests, no database writes.
  • Manual refreshes explicitly reject it as well, so there’s no way for it to sneak back in.
  • It shows a clear “Disabled” badge in the sidebar so you always know the current state.

Feed groups add a layer of nuance. When you disable a group, all feeds in that group inherit the disabled state. The visual indicator distinguishes between a feed that’s directly paused versus one that’s paused because its parent group is — so you always understand why something isn’t syncing.

Why This Matters

These two features are small in scope but significant in effect. RSS readers that don’t give you granular control over your sources gradually train you to ignore them. An unread count that includes Shorts and feeds you’ve mentally tuned out is just noise. Clean counts, clean feeds, and the ability to pause without deleting are the building blocks of a reader you’ll actually trust and use.

We think your RSS reader should be a sanctuary, not a second inbox that you dread opening.

What’s Next for Feeds

We’re working on per-feed fetch intervals (some sources you want to check hourly, others are fine to check once a day), smarter grouping and filtering tools, and better handling of high-frequency feeds that publish dozens of items per day.

If there’s a feed management feature you’ve always wished existed, tell us about it. We’re building this for real readers.