MailBucket: An Email To RSS Gateway

I’m a raving fan of RSS.

When someone sends me an interesting email newsletter, my first response is “is there an RSS feed?” Why? I don’t want newsletters and alerts cluttering up my email box, and I prefer to read all my news sources through one central RSS app (personally, I’m a fan of Google Reader). But what if that shiny new exciting email newsletter doesn’t provide an RSS feed? (Dinosaurs!)

Enter mailbucket, an email-to-RSS gateway.

If you send email to AnyAddressYouMakeUp@mailbucket.org, they’ll burn that email stream into a public feed located at www.mailbucket.org/AnyAddressYouMakeUp.xml. How cool!

To preserve history, I opted to sprinkled some gmail into the sauce. Here’s the three step recipe:

1. Create new gmail account, something like MyFeedBucketFeeds@gmail.com Pick something long and arcane to avoid spam.
2. Under the gmail ‘settings’ tab, have all the email into this box forward to MyFeedBucketFeeds@mailbucket.org, while keeping a copy in the gmail box.
   Gmail’s wonderfully large mail box serves as a history for the newsletter.
3. Subscribe to www.mailbucket.org/MyFeedBucketFeeds.xml in your favorite web or desktop RSS reader.

Don’t use MailBucket for private email, as the resulting feeds are wide open. And I wouldn’t use MailBucket for mission-critical information, in the service case hiccups or vanishes.

MailBucket: a wonderfully simple and free means to burn email to RSS. Kudos to Tom Dyson for providing this excellent resource.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Comparison Shopping, email, email-to-rss, gmail, google-reader, mailbucket, newsletter, rss, Tom-Dyson

Alan Rimm-Kaufman
Alan Rimm-Kaufman founded the Rimm-Kaufman Group...