Here’s an overview of a clever email-to-RSS hack I was forwarded. If you subscribe to an email mailing list, you can set blogger.com posting to the email address you signed up with. So, each time you get an email, it’ll post that to a blog you have set up. Then blogger.com automatically has a feed you can subscribe to. (Make sure it’s not a private mailing list of course.)
0 thoughts on “HOW TO read mailing lists as RSS feeds hack…”
maybe It is the hour I’m reading your post but…
I request you illustrate this circular process and describe
-why you would want to do this and
-why you won’t anoy a whole lot of people that you signed up to but they didn’t signup to your feed.
Could you run this again with a purpose description and a lucid example.
Might be cool; might be dreadful but it is hard to tell in the abstract
Thanks!
Gmail also has RSS feeds. If you have an email account that only has on e list subscribed to it, then you can get the subjects from RSS.
OMFG, I made a lazyweb request for this on my blog a few weeks ago. It’s so simple! I feel very stupd, but happy.
Actually, if you’re a mailing list administrator, this is really elegant, because all you have to do is set up a dummy blogger blog, add the posting email to your list, and then you can instantly offer an RSS feed to your subscribers who are interested for 100% free (not to mention an archive page). I have a PR friend who may just get a promotion for this…
To address stevehar’s concern, the idea is that you create a personal blog, and then use the posting email addy everytime you subscribe to an email list. Then you just subscribe to the personal blog’s feed in your RSS reader, and then the subscription emails don’t clog your inbox. Anytime you want to refresh the list, you just change the blog’s posting addy and the subscriptions will cease. Delete the blog and the RSS feed disappears.
What I’m curious is how it’s going to handle HTML emails, multipart attachements, etc.
tombou was almost there – Gmail also has a hidden feature: Atom feeds for Labels! The technique is simple:
It really is that simple – and there’s no need to create extra accounts, or anything silly like that.
Or just use Bloglines, which offers email-to-RSS suitable for use on private as well as public mailing lists. And also package tracking via RSS, and one of the best general purposes RSS aggregators out there.
There’s also mailbucket, which has been around for a few years now: Send email to foo@mailbucket.org and pick it up at http://www.mailbucket.org/foo.xml. Much simpler.
In addition, there’s dodgeit, which provides something pretty similar.
And, lastly, there’s this scraper for Mailman archives, which I’ve got in use on the Greasemonkey, del.icio.us, and Python web-sig lists right now.
How is that a “hack?”
What about Gmane (gmane.org)? It has archives of several mailing lists and allow us to read it from RSS feeds. Actually they have 4 types of RSS for each list:
– All messages from the list, with excerpted texts.
– Topics from the list, with excerpted texts.
– All messages from the list, with complete texts.
– Topics from the list, with complete texts.
But again, I think it only works for public mailing lists.
I have been doing some searching and I can find email to RSS programs. However, I am seeking a program that will parse an email address out of an RSS – does anyone know of anything out there that does that?