Email to RSS

March 28th, 2006 Chris Posted in Uncategorized |

I like the idea of groups like Freecycle, which work on the “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” principle. People post if they have unwanted stuff, and the first one to respond saying ‘I’ll take it’ walks off with a used whatever. I’ve gotten computer monitors and lawn chairs, among other things, for just the cost of driving
to someone’s place to pick them up.

The problem with Freecycle is that it’s run on a members-only yahoo groups account. This means that in order to stay on top of what’s being offered, I can either check the site many times per day (ain’t gonna happen), or get emailed after each post (inbox nightmare). I found myself wishing that I could make it work like Craigslist’s free section, which has a handy RSS feed.

Thanks to Mailbucket, I can turn individual emails into an RSS feed quite easily. All I had to do was set up a gmail account that subscribed to the Yahoo list emails. Then, I set it to forward all emails to asdf@mailbucket.org (where asdf is any name you choose). My emails then get parsed into a nice feed, available at http://www.mailbucket.org/asdf.xml. Sweet! Now, whenever I check my RSS reader (multiple times a day), I can quickly skim through what’s being offered on Freecycle.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS, I can not tell you how much time using Bloglines has saved me. All the sites that I read regularly now have their content in one place, and I never have to check to see if there are new posts on those sites. In addtion, it makes skimming through and reading only the best stuff really easy. If you haven’t experienced the beauty of RSS, give something like Bloglines a try.