RSS -> IMAP
I've been looking for some kind of a "better way" to read RSS feeds. As of right now, I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client. Thunderbird is nice in that it doubles as an RSS reader. The problem here is that I use several machines - work, home, laptop - on a daily basis, and I have trouble keeping track of what I have and haven't read. For example, when I get home from work and update all of my feeds, most of the feeds marked as "new" are ones that I've already read at work. The other issue is that, if I close Thunderbird, it stops checking feeds; unless I leave it open, there's a chance of missing a news item. This can be a blessing (I don't end up with 2,500 feeds to catch up on on Monday), but I'd prefer to have all of the news items and simply be able to ignore them.
rss2email (no reliable link available) will (sort of) allow me to do what I want to do. It will check all my feeds for new items, and forward them to an email account. Since I have an IMAP server running, this solves the problem of keeping track of what's been read. However, I'd also like them to be sorted into folders - which would mean configuring maildrop to do this on the server side, or configuring each of my Thunderbird clients to filter the messages as they come in. This is a pain, and it seems like there should be a better way.
Ideally, what I would like is a daemon that runs on my server at home and checks feeds, automatically placing them in some directory structure according to feed, and that keeps track of which items I've already viewed. Allowing me to tag/label things in different ways would be good, but not necessary. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything that will do this just yet. The search continues...
rss2email (no reliable link available) will (sort of) allow me to do what I want to do. It will check all my feeds for new items, and forward them to an email account. Since I have an IMAP server running, this solves the problem of keeping track of what's been read. However, I'd also like them to be sorted into folders - which would mean configuring maildrop to do this on the server side, or configuring each of my Thunderbird clients to filter the messages as they come in. This is a pain, and it seems like there should be a better way.
Ideally, what I would like is a daemon that runs on my server at home and checks feeds, automatically placing them in some directory structure according to feed, and that keeps track of which items I've already viewed. Allowing me to tag/label things in different ways would be good, but not necessary. Unfortunately, I haven't found anything that will do this just yet. The search continues...


3 Comments:
Bloglines.com was my solution to the read at home/work/etc problem. It's not perfect but it's been good enough. I don't have any interest in keeping a local copy so that wasn't a consideration for me.
Bloglines looks like it might be a good interim solution for me; it should do what I want until I can find (or write!) my own solution. Thanks, anon!
~cliff
rss2imap seems to do what you want. I'm going to try it sometime this week; it seems like the best of all possible worlds.
-- Asheesh.
Post a Comment
<< Home