Posted January 1, 2008, 6:37 pm

Email up in ur RSS

I’m a big fan of RSS, and I think we as an Internet are well beyond the point of asking if RSS is the way to go. It is. Unlike an email subscription in which control of opting in/out is delegated to the content provider, RSS feeds give all control to the subscriber. I’ve found RSS aggregation saves me an incredible amount of time, whether I’m staying up on the news, reading webcomics, or just techno-fetishizing. I prefer NetNewsWire Lite on the Mac.

So when a site offering interesting serialized content lacks an RSS feed, it derails my high-speed greased-gears mouth-to-the-firehouse web2.0 experience.

If instead of RSS they offer an email subscription to content, I have devised the following solution that will allow your aggregator to collect and notify you of new content. Keep in mind this requires a Gmail account and an RSS aggregator that allows for SSL authentication.

First off, create a new label within Gmail. I named my label simply ‘rss’, but you can get creative if that what you do. It’ll still work if you label it ‘argh ess ess’.

Second, we need to take advantage of Gmail’s tagging feature. By adding a little bit of text to your default Gmail email address you can have it pulled out of the pile and filtered. Set up a filter applying to all emails addressed to ‘[username]+[tag]@gmail.com’. In this case, since my Gmail user name is ‘jonodavis’ and the label I’m using is ‘rss’, I set it up to catch all emails addressed to ‘jonodavis+rss@gmail.com’ and to apply to them the ‘rss’ label.

I also set the filter to skip the inbox and automatically archive the messages, since I don’t need both my RSS aggregator and email notifier blowin’ up when new content is posted.

The third step is the trick. Gmail offers an RSS feed of your inbox which provides a headline + short snippet of all your emails, regardless of filter. This is located at http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom. If you want to narrow the contents of this feed to a specific label, simply append “/[label]/” to the url. In my case, the new ‘rss’ label specific RSS feed url becomes http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/rss/. Keep in mind that if you’re using an SSL aware aggregator, you’ll need to enter your Gmail username the first time you load it up.

All you need to do at this point is to subscribe to the email using the aformentioned filtered email address (username+label@gmail.com).

Now, there are some problems with this franken-fix, like the fact that Gmail only provides you with the subject line and a short excerpt from the email. My guess is that this short entry is the same one used behind the scenes of the Google Notifier.

Another flaw with this fix is that it’s not really all that slick. If you use the same auto-filtering appended email address for more than one email subscription they all go to a single feed, instead of being grouped by source. And instead of simply clicking on an RSS link and having your aggregator pop up to subscribe to it, you need to muck around in Gmail. It works, but not as well as a legit RSS feed would. So cowboy up and start a feed/get an aggregator already. Sheesh.

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