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CommodoreTex

Member

Registered: 2010-01-04

Posts: 11

Some options for RSS to email

I've been using newspipe for several years to get RSS feeds into my mailbox, primarily to archive useful tips or great articles. After seeing that newsbeuter now supports Google Reader, I decided to do my reading in it, save any good stuff as shared items, then download the shared items feed with an RSS to email program. Newspipe choked on the atom feed, though, and I wound up installing rss2email, which I just switched (back) to since it's been updated.

Some options to consider if you like to read RSS in mutt or another reader:
1) rss2email (python): nice standard program. I turned off the CSS styling in the newer version since it wasn't allowing me to easily edit content (to remove ads, annoying twitter and feedreader links, etc.) Default setting sends HTML only but you can opt to send as plain-text.
2) newspipe (python): nice program but hasn't been updated in years. Can send HTML or plain-text messages alone or as multipart. Allows filtering of ads through regular expressions (I only ever used the defaults.) Can download messages inline (for archiving) rather than linking. Probably the most full-featured of these programs, but it had a few glitches that started to annoy me.
3) feed2imap (ruby): similar to the others but uploads to an IMAP folder rather than sending through SMTP, which is nice if you have many feeds and don't want to mess with procmail, filters, or sieve. Can't eliminate the multipart option and receive as HTML only or plain-text only, if I remember correctly.

I hope this is helpful - this new setup lets me cut down on the number of emails but still archive them if I'd like. Anyone doing anything similar, or have a better way?

madalu

Member

Registered: 2009-05-05

Posts: 217

Re: Some options for RSS to email

Yes, I just switched to rss2email. I use it in conjunction with Gnus (emacs) and notmuch (email indexing). Gnus has built-in rss support, but it is *very* limited (e.g., no Atom).

I hacked the rss2email process to bypass sendmail and pipe stuff directly to procmail. The procmail is simple - it just sends everything from rss2email to a particular Maildir. As soon as I read an item in Gnus, it is automatically archived to a monthly folder. I plan to hang on to approximately the last 6 months of rss archives so that I can find recent stuff I've read via notmuch (a fantastic email search tool).

Last edited by madalu (2010-05-19 01:37:12)