Introduction

You have heared about RSS/XML and so on. You want news as fast as possible, with less effort. RSS-feeds are indeed a great evolution in the internet. But for me it is disturbing that you have to run an additional software and check the news there. Okay, it’s easier than surfing to dozens of websites, but this was not enough for me. Let’s think about we got our news in the ‘old days’ – right, via email as newsletters. As a matter of fact I don’t get any spam (yet) so email is the perfect medium for me and newsletters are fine as long as I can unsubscribe them.

So why should it not be possible to send new rss-entries via mail?
I have been searching for a while, with these results:

So there are no tools/services which fulfil my wishes.

rss2email

Wrong! After some time I found rss2email: www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss2email/ by Aaron Swartz.

Download – run – error. Nice. But I didn’t gave up: The tool is scripted in Python (yeah you need to install the Python interpreter) and on the command line it told in which line the error is. Well, how about learning a bit Python? I know some script languages already and I am always interested in new languages so I looked at the code and tried a bit to fix it. (If you are interested in the steps, I’ll post them here.) Beside some other difficulties, in the end it was a port from linux to windows (Python – platform independend? Like Java…), I also had to write a new method for mailing, because it uses like AmphetaMailer the sendmail tool.

Download

But finally it is working! And the best of it: It is still Linux compatible Download it here:
http://www.DreamFlasher.de/content/rss2email/rss2email.py
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/html2text/html2text.py
http://feedparser.org/feedparser.py

You will need these three scripts and Python!

Installation

1) Copy the three files in one directory
2) Create a new feed database: (type at command line, Python files *.py should be linked with the interpreter)

rss2email.py feeds.dat new your@domain.tld

3) Subscribe to some feeds:

rss2email.py feeds.dat add http://www.yourdomain.tld/feed.rss

4) Configuration (edit these lines in rss2email.py):

SMTP_SERVER = 'server:port'
AUTHREQUIRED = 1 # if you need to use SMTP AUTH set to 1
SMTP_USER = 'user' # for SMTP AUTH, set SMTP username here
SMTP_PASS = 'pwd' # for SMTP AUTH, set SMTP password here

When you run rss2email, it emails you about every story it hasn’t seen before. But the first time you run it, that will be every story. To avoid this, you can ask rss2email not to send you any stories the first time you run it:

rss2email.py feeds.dat run --no-send

Then later, you can ask it to email you new stories:

rss2email.py feeds.dat run

You probably want to set things up so that this command is run repeatedly. One good way is via a cron job, on windows it is easier with the task scheduler.
For more info go to www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss2email/ and don’t forget to thank Aaron Swartz for his great work!