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Export your Instapaper highlights each week

You highlight a line in an article and mean to use it in a note, a post or a newsletter. A week later the highlights are spread over a dozen articles and you do not open them again.

Cotlet does it in your own Instapaper account with list_bookmarks and list_highlights, called by your AI agent, an n8n workflow or a script.

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Hosted · nothing to install or maintain

Can Instapaper do this on its own?

The official Instapaper SDKs for API v2 list the highlights of a bookmark, create one from a passage of text and delete one (checked 17 Oct 2026). A script can do this with a token. Nothing in the app sends you the week's highlights as one digest, and there is no MCP server for an agent to call.

How you do it in Instapaper today

  1. You open an article you highlighted. Each highlight belongs to one article.
  2. You read the highlights there, one article at a time.
  3. To reuse a passage you copy it into a note app together with the link.
  4. Doing that for ten articles takes longer than reading them did.
  5. On a free account you can create only 5 highlights a month, so the few you made are worth keeping.

How to export your Instapaper highlights each week

Prompt

Every Sunday, take the Instapaper articles I archived this week. Collect my highlights from each one and send me a digest grouped by article, with the link and the passages.
  1. 01

    Pick the articles

    list_bookmarks reads section archive and keeps articles archived in your window. If your prompt says "liked", it reads section liked instead.

  2. 02

    Read highlights per article

    list_highlights runs for each article in turn. Articles with no highlights are skipped and counted, not shown as empty entries.

  3. 03

    Group and link

    The digest is grouped by article, with the title, the saved URL and the highlighted passages.

  4. 04

    Hand it over

    The agent returns the digest in the chat, or posts it where your automation sends it. Nothing in Instapaper changes, so there is nothing to confirm.

What you get back

Example data

Archived this week: 14, with highlights: 5

"How to Salt Pasta Water" (cooking.example.com)
- "Salt the water until it tastes like the sea, then add the pasta."

"The Case for Slow Software" (essays.example.org)
- "Speed is a feature only when the user asked for it."

Other ways to ask

  • Digest the highlights from all my Liked articles, not just this week's archive.
  • Send me only articles with three or more highlights.
  • Once a month, collect highlights from articles tagged "writing" into one list.
  • Read the full text of each article that has highlights and add a two-line summary under each group.

What Instapaper allows, and what to know first

  • Instapaper highlights are stored per article, so a digest needs one read per article.
  • Free accounts can create 5 highlights, which the Premium page calls notes, per month. Premium has no cap on notes.
  • When a highlight is created through the SDK, a position of 1 marks the second time the text appears in the article.

Every tool here only reads, so it can run weekly from n8n, Make, Zapier or cron without waiting for your OK.

Sources: Instapaper API v2 TypeScript SDK (official) · Instapaper Premium: free and Premium features · Instapaper API v2 OpenAPI spec

Call list_highlights from a script

curl

curl https://cotlet.dev/api/v1/instapaper/bookmarks/1893240551/highlights \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $COTLET_API_KEY"

Example response

{
  "bookmark_id": 1893240551,
  "highlights": [
    {
      "highlight_id": 77120431,
      "text": "Salt the water until it tastes like the sea, then add the pasta.",
      "created_at": "2026-10-12T19:04:00Z"
    }
  ]
}

MCP: add https://cotlet.dev/mcp/v1 with the same key; the call is instapaper_read → list_highlights. Example data.

Schedule it in n8n, Make, Zapier or cron

Instapaper tools this automation uses

Cotlet Instapaper tools used to export your Instapaper highlights each week
Tool Parameters
list_bookmarks section, folder_id, tag, limit, offset
list_highlights bookmark_id
All 12 Instapaper tools with descriptions

Frequently asked questions

Is it safe to connect Instapaper to Cotlet?

Yes. You sign in to Instapaper yourself, in your own Cloud Browser in the EU, and we never save your password. Your agents only get Instapaper once you enable it, every background request is listed, and the browser profile is stored encrypted with AES-256-GCM, the cipher 1Password uses for its vaults. The AI model never sees a login, posts and messages wait for your OK, and Disable for agents cuts access in one click. Independent scanners grade cotlet.dev A+ on Qualys SSL Labs, securityheaders.com and Mozilla Observatory; live results are on https://cotlet.dev/security.

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