GMailRSS: GMail as an RSS reader

• Since GMail stores all state on the server, it doesn't matter where you login from to get your RSS fix! You can read a couple of feeds at work, a couple at home from a different machine etc. and everything is synchronized. This was the killer feature I was missing in all RSS readers.
• GMail's infinite archiving capability effectively creates a personal news archive for everyone.
• GMail's search helps you search easily through RSS feeds.
• Individual messages can be marked as read and unread, so its easy to track what you are reading.

Now to get this to work we need to convert RSS feeds into some form Gmail can understand. My rss2mail convertor, GMail labels, and filters to the rescue. Below is the basic strategy:

• I fetch RSS feeds periodically, convert each item in each feed into an email, with the feed name in the Subject line and send it to my GMail address. This job is done by the rss2mail script.
• Create a label in GMail corresponding to each RSS feed.
• Create a filter corresponding to each RSS feed, that reads the subject line and appropriately applies the label. For example:
  

  Matches: subject:(yahoo world news) Do this: Apply label "Yahoo World News"

Although I have explained GMailRSS as a tool for reading RSS feeds in GMail, the tool itself will send email to any email address - and you can apply the same techniques of labels and filters. However I am not sure there exist any good clients that have the speed and responsiveness of GMail when you have large volumes of email. With my current RSS feed list - I get about 2000 mails a day.

The way I expect GMailRSS to be used is to create a separate GMail address devoted for RSS feeds. Depending on the numbers of RSS feeds you have, and how frequently they are updated, you don't really want your normal Inbox filled with RSS items.

In the default mode GmailRSS, will send email to your GMail address from your GMail address without needing SMTP server access, sendmail, etc. However to be as general as possible GmailRSS will also send mail to any email address and you don't have to have a GMail address.

Rants

Requirements

Getopt::Long
XML::RSS
Crypt::SSLeay

Mail::IMAPClient
Data::Dumper
IO::Socket::INET
IO::Socket::SSL
Net::SSLeay

Digest::HMAC_MD5 
MIME::Base64 
Term::ReadKey

Documentation

Installation

• tar -zxvf gmailrss.tgz
• Create a text file (feeds.lst for example) with the URLs of all the RSS feeds you want. Example:
  

  http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml
  http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Opinion.xml
  http://www.slashdot.org/slashdot.rss
  http://xml.metafilter.com/rss.xml
  

Usage

• rss2mail.pl

    Usage:  ./rss2mail.pl --list <feeds file> --feeds=<wildcard|all>
  
    Other options:
        --feeds=<wildcard>      Selectively update some feeds only
        --feeds=all             updates all feeds
  
  
        --nointeractive         Run in non-interactive mode.
                                Default is interactive mode.
        --interactive           Run in interactive mode. Default.
        --log                   Log filename (defaul gmailrss.log)
        --gmail-username        Username of your gmail account
        --gmail-password        Password of your gmail account
        --create-gmail-filters  Creates labels and filters on your gmail
                                account
  
    Advanced usage:
        --nosend-using-gmail    Don't send email gmail server for sending email
                                Use your own SMTP relay
        --skip-imap-connect     Don't attemp to connect with an IMAP server
        --imap                  IMAP host name
        --user                  IMAP and SMTP username
        --imap-password         IMAP password
        --smtp-password         SMTP password
        --email-from            Email from address to specify in mail sent
        --email-to              Email address to send RSS feeds to
        --smtp-client           smtp-client path
                                (use this to override default client
                                 and use something else)
        --imap-client           imap-client path
                                (use this to override default client
                                 and use something else)
  
  
  

  There is only one difference between the advanced usage commands and the basic usage. In the basic usage mode, GmailRSS uses GMail to send mail also (the Mail::WebMail::GMail perl module). What basically happens here is you send email from your GMail address back to your own address.

  In the advanced usage mode you use a dedicated SMTP server to send mail.

  Mail traffic: If you subscribe to a very large number of feeds and use the basic usage of using GMail to send your mail also, GMail may have issues with this and may or may not temporarily suspend your account. I recommend using a 3rd party SMTP relay to send mail and using GMail just for reading.

  Getting started

  Rememeber I mentioned labels and filters in the begining? Thats what the create-gmail-filters option does. You need to run with this switch once when you start off, and labels and filters corresponding to all your RSS feeds will be automagically created in your GMail account.

  Normal usage

  Now you simply set up a cron-job that runs this script without the create-gmail-filters, every 2 hours or so, and voila you have RSS feeds at your email address.

  When you run rss2mail, it will create a bunch of dat files that it uses to keep track of state of the different RSS feeds. Do not delete the dat files.

• update.sh

  Edit the source of this script and fill in the addresses, server names etc. First arugment to this script has to be "interactive" or "nointeractive". It takes the remaining arguments and passes them along as --feeds= to rss2mail.pl.

     Usage: ./update.sh <iteractive|noiteracitve> <feed names>
  

• Example Usage

  Basic Usage: Example 0

  Create filters. You need to run this exactly once. You can create the labels and filters manually also, makes no difference to GMailRSS.

  ./rss2email.pl --list feeds.lst --feeds=all --nointeractive --gmail-username foo --gmail-password foo --create-gmail-filters
  

  Basic Usage: Example 1

  Update all feeds non interactively.

  ./rss2email.pl --list feeds.lst --feeds=all --nointeractive --gmail-username foo --gmail-password foo
  

  Advanced Usage: Example 1

  Update all feeds non interactively.

  ./rss2email.pl --list feeds.lst --feeds=all --nointeractive --nosend-using-gmail
  --imap imap.server.com --user foo --imap-password password1
  -smtp-password password2 --email-from foo@imap.server.com --email-to foo@gmail.com
  

  Advanced Usage: Example 2

  Update slashdot and metafilter feeds non interactively. A substring match is done on the URL name of the RSS feeds and the string specified in --feeds=

  ./rss2email.pl --list feeds.lst --feeds=slashdot --feeds-metafilter --nosend-using-gmail
  --nointeractive --imap imap.server.com --user foo --imap-password password1 
  --smtp-password password2 --email-from foo@imap.server.com --email-to foo@gmail.com
  

  Example 3

  Above example, using update.sh

  ./update.sh nointeractive slashdot metafilter
  

Screenshots

Updates

• Aug 22, 2005: ver-1.3:
  1. Added digest capability
     Add "digest" next to the url name and instead of individual mails for each item you will get one mail digest with a horizontal line separating each item.
  2. Added --blog-roll. Creates a HTML blog-roll of feed names

My feeds

Google's reaction

End notes