Be Not In My Email - Be In My RSS

January 2, 2008 3:27 AM

How can I get emails sent to RSS? Easy, no?

A fairly simple query I thought but seemingly not. I get sent a series of alerts (mainly for work) via email and would like to get them in the same place as all my other alerts (in Google Reader).

What I'm looking for is a service which will take an email and convert it into an RSS feed I can subscribe to. Most things I've found (RSSfwd.com, sendmerss.com) are for converting RSS to email, not vice versa. I've also tried mailbucket.org which works to an extent - however this messes up all the formatting and makes them illegible - defeating the object somewhat.

Any thoughts are most gratefully received!

posted by eb98jdb to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Maybe setup a blog account with wordpress, blogger, etc. that support RSS feeds then setup to post to the blog via e-mail. Instructions will vary but a search for "blog post via e-mail" should return some info. Kind of a round-about way, but I think it should work.
posted by hungrysquirrels at 3:46 AM on January 2, 2008

Gmail provides an RSS feed of the inbox and it would be easy to set up an account to receive the alerts.
posted by tallus at 4:12 AM on January 2, 2008

I can't help with the actual email to RSS converter but don't forget that Google Reader has the limitation that it can't subscribe to a private feed. i.e, anything that needs a name and password to login, including Gmail feeds. This is a problem unless you're prepared to make these messages public so anyone could potentially read them.

A possible solution to that is to make the RSS feed URL a long random string of characters. That becomes sort of a password in itself. It's "security by obscurity" but might do depending on how private the messages really need to be.
posted by tetranz at 4:24 AM on January 2, 2008

You can also do something similar in bloglines - setting up a specific email address to read in an RSS reader.
posted by mattr at 4:31 AM on January 2, 2008

Setting up a Gmail account to monitor this would work apart from, as I understand it, the RSS feed is in the form https://mail.google.com/a/[INSERT YOUR DOMAIN]/feed/atom and you then enter your user name and login. I believe that Google Reader won't let me use an authenticated feed (it certainly didn't when I just tried it!).

Any other thoughts / workarounds?
posted by eb98jdb at 5:49 AM on January 2, 2008

If you're willing to try using Bloglines instead of Google Reader, they will provide you with as many @bloglines.com e-mail addresses as you want that will turn into feeds. I don't think you can export them but I might be wrong.
posted by grouse at 5:59 AM on January 2, 2008

Googling for "rss imap" turns up a number of gateways that go in the direction you want, including the first hit, whose text is "imap2rss.php is a simple PHP application that generates an RSS 2.0 feed from the messages within an IMAP folder..."
posted by hattifattener at 9:52 AM on January 2, 2008