NetNewsWire is a free and open-source RSS, Atom and JSON Feed reader for macOS and iOS, developed by Brent Simmons under Ranchero Software and released under the MIT licence. It is a client application that runs on end-user devices and fetches only the feeds each subscriber has added, so its requests originate from ordinary consumer IP addresses rather than from shared crawler infrastructure; there is consequently no published IP range and no reverse-DNS verification method for this agent. Refresh intervals are configured by the user in the app. Current builds identify as "NetNewsWire (RSS Reader; https://netnewswire.com/)", and older releases send a Mozilla-prefixed Mac string ending in NetNewsWire/<version>. Some third-party feed clients, such as Tapestry, have been observed appending their own product token to that legacy NetNewsWire string.

At a glance

Operator: Ranchero Software
Type: Feed Reader

How Centinel checks it

User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.

NetNewsWire publishes nothing Centinel can check a source against, so a match reports the name and leaves the source unconfirmed. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.

Allowing or blocking it

The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, Feed Reader.

Back to the crawler catalog