Email to RSS Gateway
Posted by Bill Rini @ 11:10 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
A couple of days ago I got a wild hair up my backside and started designing an email to RSS gateway. It all started when I read an article over at Lockergnome about RSS feeds replacing newsletters. I became mildly obsessed with the idea because I have a lot of different interests and the only way I can keep up with everything is via email discussion groups and newsletters. I don’t have the time to check every site, every day and waiting for new content. Only problem is that I have both an RSS newsreader that gives me the websites that support RSS but I still have to receive all of the emails in one of my email accounts. I used to use a combination of a Netscape, Hotmail, and Yahoo mail accounts to keep everything straight but Netscape Mail kinda sucks because it has almost no advanced functions, Hotmail either intentionally or due to some sort of bug began counting stuff in my “Junk Mail” folder against my disk space allocation so I was getting warnings every single day that I was over my limit, and Yahoo . . . well, if you use Yahoo Messenger insists on telling you when every single piece of mail arrives which can become quite annoying.
So, I set out to turn my newsletters and mailing list traffic into a RSS newsfeed. I thought it would be pretty easy. Ha! Actually, it wasn’t that difficult but it did throw me a few surprises. I’ve got 3 mailing lists and a newsletter more or less working (no emails are being missed — so far) and I’ll keep testing things out for a bit to see how it holds up against a variety of different mailing lists.
I’m on the fence whether or not to release it as open source and let people just run their own gateways or whether or not it’s easier to just host it and allow people to use it for free. I can see a lot of abuse if it’s offered as a hosted service but on the other hand I don’t really want to answer a lot of questions from people about why they can’t get it working on their system. I’ll post more as the code firms up and I have some more time to think about the open source vs. hosted solutions.
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COMMENTS / 7 COMMENTS
Bill Rini added these pithy words on Oct 14 03 at 6:10 amHi Ville, I just found Mailbucket while in the middle of working on this. Looks like they’ve done a pretty nice job.
Ville added these pithy words on Oct 14 03 at 6:10 amI love the idea of an email->rss gateway and hope you do release your work for others to use, enjoy and possible improve.
By the way you may or may not know but you’re really on the edge with this email->rss thing… However your not the first one: Check http://www.mailbucket.com for an operational, hosted gateway. Hopefully you’ll get something positive out of mailbucket.com … possible some improvement ideas for your own gate.
Window Six Weblog :: More on the Email -> RSS Gateway added these pithy words on Oct 14 03 at 7:10 am[...] Notes”>[Email -> RSS Gateway Notes] -
Bill @ 19:34:02As Ville pointed out there seems to be an existing project (Mailbucket.org) doing something ve [...]
R added these pithy words on Dec 24 03 at 5:12 amRelease it! Because you’ll save me and zillions others time. Somebody like me will I need exactly this, and went looking for it. The we found your piece of software…. now we’re spared a few hours of hacking the basics, and if it isn’t perfect for our needs, we’d improve it.
Seriuously - google for ‘email to rss’ and you’ll find two or three emrbryonic efforts. I did it because I need an rss-2-email gate as a way to publish news items, poor-man’s content-management I guess. And I’m prepared to hack…
frank added these pithy words on Jan 18 04 at 2:01 amI looked everywhere for one, hope you release it.
Derek added these pithy words on Mar 31 04 at 1:03 amIf you wouldn’t mind releasing it, i would really appreciate it. I have a wicked idea, and would rather start with what you’ve got than re-invent that part of my wheel.
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