Today I found out that Melo has gone the RSS-to-email route - but instead of newspipe, he's using Plagger, which I've been trying to wrap my head around for the past half hour or so.
I like its modular, plugin/filter approach, and will be running it alongside newspipe for a while (at least until I figure out how effective it really is against RSS advertising and check out its MIME format).
I am not, however, too crazy about its Perlishness. Life's too short to keep trying to decrypt other people's code, and Perl is especially nasty in that regard.