I’ve been using AWeber’s RSS content block in my broadcasts for long time without any issues. Nothing has changed on my end (feed is public, no authentication, no redirects), but it recently stopped working completely.
Here’s what I’ve tested and observed:
- Static content only → sends and delivers normally
- RSS content only → status shows “Sent” but 0% deliveries
- Mixed content (RSS + static text) → email sends, but the RSS section comes out completely blank
- Preview inside AWeber → sometimes loads correctly, sometimes doesn’t
- Feed URL accessed directly in browser → works fine, feed is publicly accessible
I think the issue is how AWeber processes the RSS block at send time, not in the feed itself. The feed is public and has been working for a long time until now.
This looks like something changed on AWeber’s side - possibly in the RSS rendering engine used during sending, which behaves differently from the preview.
Has anyone experienced this recently? Any known fix or workaround?
I have a broadcast template with 3 RSS content blocks (blog, products, news). One of them (products) was empty because there was no content in that feed at the time.
This used to work fine until now - when a feed was empty, AWeber would simply skip that block and send the email normally. At some point this behavior changed: now, if any RSS block in the email has no content, the entire email either fails to deliver (0% deliveries) or sends with all RSS sections blank, with no error message or warning shown anywhere in the interface.
The issue is not with the feed itself - it is publicly accessible.
The problem is AWeber silently failing when an RSS block returns no items, instead of skipping it gracefully as it used to.
Expected behavior: empty RSS blocks should be skipped or ignored, as they previously were.
Actual behavior: empty RSS block causes the entire broadcast to fail silently.
How can I solve this issue?
Hey Andre,
I would recommend reaching out to Customer Solutions directly so we can take a look at your feed, along with your messages.
Troubleshooting would require us to take a closer look at your set up to see what is going on.
In the meantime, we do also have our guide for troubleshooting the RSS feed and any issues you may run into.
We look forward to speaking with you to get this resolved!
Andre,
Messages that contain feeds with no content are intentionally not sent to avoid sending blank emails to people. That behavior was changed recently after we’ve seen more captchas and other bot mitigation techniques being used on RSS feeds that cause our spiders to be unable to retrieve content that users otherwise expect to be retrievable.
Please contact CS directly per Amanda’s post above so we can look at your specific account and see if there’s an alternate solution.
Thank you for the fast answer. I will probably merge my 3 RSS feeds into a single one.
I think that’s the best way to avoid this issue going forward. 