MasterNewMedia by Robin Good
Be Smart, Be Independent, Be Good

February 1, 2004



Email To RSS In Three Easy Steps


The time has come.
You can now freely generate an RSS feed for any YahooGroup or similar email discussion or distribution list (Topica, Listbuilder, Sparklist, Lyris, Majordomo IMN, etc.).

The process is very simple, it is free, and it may take at most three minutes.
(I refer to Yahoogroups in my example but this can be done with any mailing/discussion/newsletter distribution list).

Here is how to do it:



1) Go to MAILbyRSS and register yourself.
here is the URL to sign up:
http://www.iupload.com/product/signup.asp
Complete the registration form in which you may decide RSS title and description.

2) In the email that you will receive from MAILbyRSS there will be an item labelled "email". Subscribe that strange looking email address to your Yahoogroup discussion or mailing list. That will create an automatic mechanism whereby each email sent to your Yahoogroup will be sent to that email address and in turn converted into an RSS feed.

3) In the same confirmation email that ame from MAILtoRSS there is another piece of important information called "RSS Channel". Copy that URL and promote it to all of your contacts and readers. Tell them that they can use this URL in any RSS newsreader to receive your news and updates, bypassing altogether the need to get more email, or to have to submit your email.

That's all.

As a side bonus you also get a dynamically generated Web page where the content of this RSS feed is automatically displayed. All automatically, all free.

Here is the last issue (Jan.21st 2004) of my text newsletter MasterMind Explorer converted into a full RSS feed and in a directly accessible Web page.

MAILtoRSS
MailbyRSS is a FREE service for authoring RSS channels by email. It is ideal for organizations that wish to augment their opt-in e-mail campaigns with RSS channels, providing them a way to ensure that the information they publish reaches subscribers without being blocked by spam lists or filters. MailbyRSS accepts both text and rich content email, requires no new computer hardware or software, and is invoked by simply emailing content to a secure MailbyRSS account.

Alternative:
Awasu (a free RSS news reader) has a plugin that takes email from a POP or IMAP account and generates a feed for it.

http://www.awasu.com/downloads/ThirdParty/Email/
(Thanks to the RSS Lockergnome Forum for this alternative solution)

Conversation Tags:
Readers' Comments    
Click here to post a comment!
2004-02-18 15:59:51

Jansen

Just found another email2rss service. MailBucket: http://www.mailbucket.org/



2004-02-18 08:46:19

Robin Good

YahooGroups now provides direct RSS feeds natively.

If your preferred YahooGroup is set for open, public viewing of the message archives, then you need only to add the extension "messages?rss=1" to the complete URL and you have a full RSS feed for that YahooGroup. As simple as that.

Here is one easy example: Nancy White's great Online Facilitation discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onlinefacilitation/ has now a new public RSS feed available here.



2004-02-18 08:45:38

Robin Good

YahooGroups now provides direct RSS feeds natively.

If your preferred YahooGroup is set for open, public viewing of the message archives, then you need only to add the extension "messages?rss=1" to the complete URL and you have a full RSS feed for that YahooGroup. As simple as that. Here is one easy example: Nancy White's great Online Facilitation discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onlinefacilitation/ has now a new public RSS feed available here.



2004-02-14 15:34:28

Robin Good

Creating a Yahoogroups RSS feed is indeed possible but unless the email being sent to MailByRSS has your specified "To:" field complete, it will not be processed by MailByRSS and considered Spam.

You can work around this limitation in at least three ways:

1) Create a forward email that is subscribed to the YahooGroup. The forward email then takes the YahooGroup messages received and forwards them to the specific MailByRSS address you have been assigned.

2) Create a rule in your Outlook or other email client so that when you receive an email from that Yahoogroup, that email is immediately forwarded to your MailByRSS address.

3) Utilize Dodgeit.com http://www.dodgeit.com, which is a new free online all-catch email basket and RSS generator.

Steps are as simple as:

a) Got to Yahoogroups and set as a member yourselectedname@dodgeit.com.

b) Post a message to the YahooGroup.

c) Go to Dodgeit.com and input yourselectedname and then click on Check Mail.

d) See mail and see also RSS feed URL under the orange tag XML displayed on that page.

This will do it.

Robin G.



2004-02-13 23:14:38

Robin Good

There is a problem when applying the above to YahooGroups which makes it look like nothing is working. Yahoo groups does not put any address in the TO line except the GROUP owner. SO when MailByRSS opens the email it has no idea where the post is to be published too. So it thinks it is spam, and it deletes it.

MAILbyRSS is not a series of inidividual mailboxes, but one large catch all. MAILbyRSS reads the ID in the TO line and files appropriately. No TO line and the message gets deleted as SPAM.

One work around is a rule on your client email that forwards it to your specific MAILbyRSS accountID. That is. As soon as you get a message from the selected YahooGroup you can automatically send it to your specific MailbyRSS mailbox without any problem at all.

I hope this helps.




2004-02-12 03:21:09

Chris Vincent

That's a good idea. I was actually thinking (inspired by Mac OS X Mail's threading feature) about writing a script that would turn a mailing list into a flat forum format, but I never got around to it.



2004-02-02 09:34:15

Suhit Anantula

Robin:

That's a cool service.

I have been using Bloglines as my RSS reader which also has a e-mail to RSS service.

But here the interesting thing is that it will generate a unique feed for any YahooGroup which can be then circulated. That's cool.

Suhit



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posted by Robin Good on Sunday, February 1 2004, updated on Saturday, January 21 2006


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