Fighting the Backlog
Jun. 24th, 2010 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI am pleased that a plan that I've had for a few years now has finally been put into action, and its helping me with my email backlog. I have many complaints about the way that many mail readers work, and the great amount of effort it usually takes (when its possible at all) to get them to show me my mail the way I want to see it.
Some time ago I realized that for many purposes RSS readers did a better job of showing me my mail than my mail clients. The big question was then, how to get selected mail to show up in an RSS reader? In particular I wanted to have all the mailing lists that I'm perpetually behind on to show up in my daily RSS feeds. All of the mailing lists that are published with parallel RSS feeds was easy -- I just subscribed to them in my RSS Reader, and unsubscribed from my mail.
An obvious idea was to subscribe to my email lists via Google Mail and use its RSS feed feature. The trouble is, gmail requires RSS authentication support to work and my preferred RSS reader (ironically enough, Google Reader) doesn't support authentication. There are a few email-to-RSS gateways out there, but all of the ones I looked at were, either unreliable, defunct, or highly restricted.
In the end I came up with a multi-part plan. Currently I subscribe to my mailing lists with my main gmail account. I then put in filters to forward all mailinglists that I'd like to see as RSS feeds. They forward to a second gmail account which handles nothing but public mailinglists. Thus I am willing to give its email password to any email-to-RSS gateways that work that way, for testing purposes.
More importantly, I also have a growing set of filters set up on this second mailing list to weed out duplicate mail and other things I don't want to see in my RSS feeds. This was not easy to set up as it took an entire day of experimenting to find out what the processing model is for gmail's filters, so I could set up filter chains. Naturally, this is documented nowhere.
Anything that makes it through those filters gets forwarded to a blogger account that I set up for the purpose. I have one blog per mailinglist. Thus, for example, my TranshumanTech mailinglist shows up here as a blog, and I've subscribed to the RSS feeds for the blogs so I can read them in my RSS reader of choice.
Now that certainly is a much bigger run-around than I'd hoped for and certainly far more complicated than it needs to be. My initial plan was to build something in software to work as a filtering gateway (and with far more sophisticated filtering capabilities than gmail allows) but I've still yet to get my mail and web server functional and that would be a necessary pre-condition. Then I figured there should be some sort of semi-adequate free service out there that would do what I wanted, but I was unable to find anything.
So, in the end I cobbled together this mess. Its not pretty, but it does the job. Since I set it up, my mailinglists are no longer accumulating dust in my unread mail folders.
Some time ago I realized that for many purposes RSS readers did a better job of showing me my mail than my mail clients. The big question was then, how to get selected mail to show up in an RSS reader? In particular I wanted to have all the mailing lists that I'm perpetually behind on to show up in my daily RSS feeds. All of the mailing lists that are published with parallel RSS feeds was easy -- I just subscribed to them in my RSS Reader, and unsubscribed from my mail.
An obvious idea was to subscribe to my email lists via Google Mail and use its RSS feed feature. The trouble is, gmail requires RSS authentication support to work and my preferred RSS reader (ironically enough, Google Reader) doesn't support authentication. There are a few email-to-RSS gateways out there, but all of the ones I looked at were, either unreliable, defunct, or highly restricted.
In the end I came up with a multi-part plan. Currently I subscribe to my mailing lists with my main gmail account. I then put in filters to forward all mailinglists that I'd like to see as RSS feeds. They forward to a second gmail account which handles nothing but public mailinglists. Thus I am willing to give its email password to any email-to-RSS gateways that work that way, for testing purposes.
More importantly, I also have a growing set of filters set up on this second mailing list to weed out duplicate mail and other things I don't want to see in my RSS feeds. This was not easy to set up as it took an entire day of experimenting to find out what the processing model is for gmail's filters, so I could set up filter chains. Naturally, this is documented nowhere.
Anything that makes it through those filters gets forwarded to a blogger account that I set up for the purpose. I have one blog per mailinglist. Thus, for example, my TranshumanTech mailinglist shows up here as a blog, and I've subscribed to the RSS feeds for the blogs so I can read them in my RSS reader of choice.
Now that certainly is a much bigger run-around than I'd hoped for and certainly far more complicated than it needs to be. My initial plan was to build something in software to work as a filtering gateway (and with far more sophisticated filtering capabilities than gmail allows) but I've still yet to get my mail and web server functional and that would be a necessary pre-condition. Then I figured there should be some sort of semi-adequate free service out there that would do what I wanted, but I was unable to find anything.
So, in the end I cobbled together this mess. Its not pretty, but it does the job. Since I set it up, my mailinglists are no longer accumulating dust in my unread mail folders.
