rss2email is a handy little program that I started using for all of my RSS/Atom feeds. I had been using Thunderbird, but it was a pain (not possible!) to keep feeds sync’d across different computers. I’m so used to imap for mail, which keeps everything sync’d, that feeds were a real problem.

rss2email is very simple to install and set up. It basically polls the feed site for new articles, and emails them to you if there are new ones. I ran rss2email on my old FreeBSD box for a few weeks, and then moved it to my new Debian box. Debian has a package so it is really easy, though I found that when I need to updated one of the components, I had to do that manually.

Basically all you need to do is “r2e add [email]>” where feed is the URL to the RSS or Atom feed, and email is option. I use email with something like “sean+RSS.” so that I get automatic filtering into imap folders… The “+” is a feature of postfix that is very nice. Then you need to use “r2e run,” to scan for new posts. I have this running in a cron job every 15 or 30 minutes.

Anyway, now all my RSS feeds go to my email, so no matter what computer I’m using, I’m in sync.

The only real drawback is that some feeds only give a link to the post. Thunderbird feed reader was smart enough to just load it in to the client window. But since the link is now in an email, thunderbird does not load the link. Not a big deal, and in someways this is more efficient as I don’t open every article.

/Sean