RSS2Email Headaches

August 26, 2007 4:47 PM

RSS2EmailFilter: Help me get individual RSS posts into my Gmail inbox.

So, for the last 24 hours I have been trying to get RSS feeds individually mailed to my Gmail account. There are a good amount of options for doing this, but none are working the way I want them to.


What I want in an RSS 2 Email solution:

Each post will be sent as an individual email.
Each post will have the posting title in the subject line.
Feeds can be checked every 10 – 20 minutes.


The solutions I have checked into and the reason they are not for me:

PopHeadlines - This is almost an acceptable solution. This program runs in the background on the PC and allows you to pull the RSS feeds into any POP3 mail client. So I threw this on my PC and started setting up feeds in Outlook Express. Then, with mail rules, I was able to forward individual emails to my gmail account. Wonderful! It works! No, no it doesn’t. The contents of the post are thrown in an HTML file and sent as an attachment. In Outlook Express they are shown inline, which is great, but in Gmail I have to click View or Download. This is not going to work for me. The posting needs to be inline and NOT an attachment. ( Any way to modify this program to put the posting inline or possibly force Gmail to show inline?)

rss2email - This looks like it may work, but knowing nothing about python, I am not able to get this running. Even if I was to get it to work, it doesn’t look like I can change the port or SSL settings. This may be a deal breaker.

RssFwd & R-Mail – While these are probably the easiest solution, feeds are only parsed every couple hours. This leaves me with 100 – 200 new emails in my mailbox every couple hours. The other problems with these sites is that they are not really reliable. Today, I went 8 hours without receiving any feeds and then I received a good 250 feeds at once. If I can get feeds every 10 – 20 minutes it gives me a better idea of the order of the postings. It also allows me the ability to get to new postings when they arrive, rather than 2 hours after they were posted.


So, what are my options? Is there a client out there (like FeedDemon) that will allow me to throw in an SMTP server and forward the feeds? Is there a script out there that I could get to work, maybe host on my Dreamhost account? Help!!!

posted by B(oYo)BIES to computers & internet (8 comments total)

(RTFA-MF and took out the rssfwd suggestion)

Not sure about what mail client you use, but Thunderbird's rss reader function may be exactly what you're looking for.
posted by jbroome at 5:27 PM on August 26, 2007

You could simply use Google Reader for RSS, then use this greasemonkey script to add a "feeds" folder to gmail, displaying all your feeds within the native gmail interface.

It would require no server-side shenanigans, just a simple browser add-on to get it working.
posted by mathowie at 7:28 PM on August 26, 2007

How are your coding chops? There are plenty of libraries for parsing XML in perl, python and ruby. If you have access to a linux server with wget, cron and mail on it, it would be pretty easy to do.
posted by chrisamiller at 9:23 PM on August 26, 2007

I had the exact same problem as you and eventually I gave up on rss-to-email entirely due to the flakey nature of feed deliveries. Now I use Google Reader instead.
posted by katala at 1:11 AM on August 27, 2007

I use newspipe. I tried to host it on my Dreamhost account, but no matter how much I niced the job, it went over Dreamhost memory limits and was killed. I had about 100 feeds.

Now I host it on a home machine and have it use Dreamhost to mail me.
posted by adamwolf at 6:31 AM on August 27, 2007

r-mail.org might work for you...
posted by omair at 9:11 AM on August 27, 2007

Ding. Ding. Ding. We have a winner. Thank you so much adamwolf. Works like a charm!!
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 11:14 AM on August 27, 2007

If newspipe doesn't work out for you, I'm the maintainer of rss2email. Just send me an email and I can assist you with getting it working.
posted by turbodog at 10:16 AM on August 28, 2007