You can access Gmail over IMAP and pull down messages locally. If you do this; Back. Up. Your. Mbox.

Also, fun fact, you can move messages from a local mbox to Gmail while preserving read status and original dates if you want to add old email to Gmail for some reason.

For RSS I like ReadYou, for feeds I like Mastodon with a variety of interests followed. There are a surprising number of orgs on Mastodon these days.

I’m not sure what you’re shopping for with AES-NI but I can strongly recommend the HP T730 and T740 thin clients if you’re trying to build a budget home firewall machine. Both support AES-NI (but obviously not Xeon QAT) and the t730 is cheap on eBay. Drop whatever NIC and an SSD in and you’re off to the races with OPNSense. The T740 is performant enough to run OPNSense on Proxmox if that’s your thing, you’ll have plenty of spare processing time to do something else on the machine beyond routing/firewalling a 1-2Gb home connection.