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Old 28 Sep 2006, 11:51 PM   #1
feklee
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Germany
Posts: 21
Question RSS -> Email?

I'd like to subscribe to RSS feeds and have the *individual* posts delivered to
my Fastmail inbox. As Fastmail doesn't seem to offer RSS feed subscription, I
want to make use of an external service. But which one?

Some that I've checked out heard about:[list][*] Yahoo Mail: Subscribing to RSS seems to be possible. However, to get the
emails into my Fastmail account, I'd have to buy a premium Yahoo Mail
subscription because otherwise pop access or mail forwarding isn't available.
That'd be OK, *if* the service is good. Has anyone tested it? Is it
possible to get *one* RSS post as *one* email message? Is it possible to
download these messages via POP, or are they stored in a separate folder
that's inaccessible by POP?
[*] Gmail: I heard that they have added an RSS subscription feature this year.
Anyone: Does this feature allow conversion of each RSS post into *one* email
that can be downloaded using POP?
[*] squeet.com, feedblitz.com, r-mail.org: While simple to use, these services
all seem to have two big disadvantages:
  1. They tend to collect multiple RSS posts into each email.
  2. After subscribing to an RSS feed, one only gets new posts. However, after
    subscribing to a feed, I want to get all old messages as well, each in an
    individual email.[/list=1]
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Old 29 Sep 2006, 01:06 PM   #2
Rip Slagcheek
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Location: NYC // Texas
Posts: 72
News Aggregators

haven't tried any of them but they appear to do the multiple posts thing...


maybe this?
http://mail2rss.org/
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Old 29 Sep 2006, 04:32 PM   #3
feklee
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Germany
Posts: 21
Quote:
Originally posted by Rip Slagcheek
News Aggregators
Thanks, very valuable link!

Quote:
haven't tried any of them but they appear to do the multiple posts thing...
Unfortunately, many do. Remember that I want to have one post in one mail, not multiple posts in one mail.

Quote:
maybe this?
http://mail2rss.org/
That's the wrong direction. I want to read RSS by email, not email by RSS.
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Old 30 Sep 2006, 02:32 AM   #4
BinaryTB
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If you find a good solution/service, please post it here, I'm interested in something similar too, multiple -> multiple.
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Old 3 Oct 2006, 01:18 PM   #5
Rip Slagcheek
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thanks to this thread, i decided i might want to play around with my rss feeds archived into a gmail account. I just signed up for Squeet and imported my OPML file from bloglines. The settings in squeet say you can get individual emails -- will let you know if that's indeed the case.

Over the weekend I used rssfwd.com to forward individual posts to the gmail account -- this does work, but you have to add the feeds individually as far as I can tell.
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Old 4 Oct 2006, 11:22 AM   #6
Rip Slagcheek
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between rssfwd & squeet, i prefer rssfwd.

Inbox appearance:

rssfwd: from=website/blog title, subject=post title

squeet: from=DoNotReply; subject=website--post title


screenshot (DoNotReply posts from squeet)
http://i12.tinypic.com/2qn5grn.png
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Old 5 Oct 2006, 05:33 AM   #7
feklee
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Posts: 21
Smile Conclusion

I finally set up the program rss2email v2.60 in a user account on a server that's online 24/7. Some of my settings, taken from "rss2email.py":
Code:
DEFAULT_FROM = "events@rss2email.invalid"
HTML_MAIL = 0
FORCE_FROM = 0
TRUST_GUID = 1
DATE_HEADER = 0
DATE_HEADER_ORDER = ('modified', 'issued', 'created')
QP_REQUIRED = 0
VERBOSE = 0
USE_PUBLISHER_EMAIL = 0
SMTP_SEND = 0
BONUS_HEADER = '\nX-RSS-GROUP: events'
OVERRIDE_FROM = {}
FEED_TIMEOUT = 60
USE_CSS_STYLING = 0
PROXY=""
The program is executed once every hour by a cron job. In my Fastmail account, I set up a filter for filing the messages associated with the header "X-RSS-GROUP: events" into a folder called "Events". BTW, it's rather simple to separately install and configure several instances of rss2email. So, I may set up additional "RSS groups" in the future.

The above solution produces perfect results. Still, I'd have preferred a service that's administrated by someone else, but none of those that I investigated met my requirements:
  • Emails should be nicely formatted. For example with rssfwd.com the subject lines were broken when viewed with my email client, Wanderlust.
  • One RSS post should be translated into one email.
  • After subscribing to an RSS feed I want to receive *all* posts currently in the feed, not just those that are added after I subscribed.
Some links concerning RSS to email gateways:
The most promising service of those above is probably http://www.feedmailr.com/, an RSS to IMAP service. However, I wasn't able to try it out, due to the lack of an account (they didn't reply to my inquiry).

Then there are also RSS to NNTP gateways, which I briefly investigated.
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Old 11 Oct 2006, 02:09 PM   #8
Rip Slagcheek
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Thanks for the additional research & comment, feklee. I'm still playing around with squeet, r-mail, and feedblitz -- none of which format posts/mail the way I'd like. I'm considering installing rss2email like you did.

My other complaint is with some feeds (most obvious in feedburner) that truncate posts so you'll click through to the site (not that I blame the feed's author for setting it up this way.)

It's been a cool experiment -- and a decent way to play around with some free email accounts. Right now I have the email sent to gmail, then forwarded to an AOL account. Gmail makes it easy to search and file the posts, while the AOL imap makes it easy to save any posts (and copy to Fastmail for reference) but does not filter the mail to different folders to make it useful. I originally sent some mail to fastmail, then decided "why waste storage and bandwidth when AOL is giving it away?"

It will indeed be great when email, rss, IM, etc are nice interchangeable feeds.
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Old 6 Mar 2007, 11:49 AM   #9
Rip Slagcheek
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A couple of months ago I converted my laptop to Ubuntu, which made it much easier than trying to test a lot of these programs on windows. I'm hooked on feed2imap, which uploads feeds directly to any IMAP folder. rss2email might still be better if you send stuff through procmail or some other sort of filter based on header data, but feed2imap is perfect for me.
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