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Weblog:   RSS Reading via Email
Subject:   RSS via Email
Date:   2003-06-20 09:25:24
From:   anonymous2
Response to: RSS via Email

What about feeding RSS data into public IMAP mailboxes and vice versa? There are some pretty good IMAP clients out there finally; now all we need are more service providers willing to serve public and shared IMAP mailboxes. Does anyone know providers who offer that? It seems like most public/shared IMAP stuff is happening at universities (just like the way the Internet was in '90-'93!).
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  • RSS via Email
    2003-06-20 16:46:06  robla [Reply | View]

    Traditionally, setting up a public, read-only IMAP mailbox has been clunky and hard. It's been years since I've tried it, though, so things could have changed.

    There's a couple of nice characteristics of news/NNTP reading as opposed to IMAP:

    1. URLs for news://... are widely implemented and reasonably well understood. I'm sure there's interop issues if you go digging, and I'm sure that you can find a spec for imap://..., but news URLs are more mature.

    2. Newsreaders typically store the "read" status of a message on the client, and IMAP mail readers typically store them on the server. I'm not sure if IMAP is theoretically configurable in this way, and I'm even less sure if typical IMAP mail readers would have implemented it anyway even if it's theoretically possible.

    Rob
    • RSS via Email
      2003-06-21 21:15:53  anonymous2 [Reply | View]

      Check out BlogStreet's Info Aggregator http://rss.blogstreet.com/
      Its a RSS-to-IMAP service that allows you to read RSS Feeds in your favorite Mail Client like Outlook, Evolution, Mozilla Mail etc. requiring no software download and its a 2-Minute setup.
      There are other tools like RSS Generator which allows you to easily generate RSS feeds of those blogs which don't have one.
      • RSS via Email
        2003-06-22 03:59:43  anonymous2 [Reply | View]

        This sounds great. I signed up and set up both Pine and Mulberry to access their IMAP server but so far haven't been able to access (or even see) the blogs that I subscribed to via their web-based subscription page. Any tips for setting this up? What IMAP client are you using?

        Thanks.
        • RSS via Email
          2003-06-24 09:05:14  anonymous2 [Reply | View]

          In case anyone is interested, I eventually was able to see the RSS feeds in my IMAP clients. The reason that I was confused before is that I expected each feed to be in its own public IMAP mailbox and that I would be able to see all these mailboxes immediately upon subscribing to them. But the way it works is that after you subscribe, the feeds all start being delivered to your INBOX and your INBOX builds up a massive amount of intertwingled messages from all the RSS feeds that you subscribed to *starting at the time that you subscribed*. It would be useful if they explained this on http://rss.blogstreet.com!
Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.