MailbyRSS: a way to convert email messages to RSS feeds
Feb 10th, 2004 by Jon Stahl
MailbyRSS is a free service from a company called iupload that allows folks to create RSS feeds by sending email messages to iupload’s servers. This potentially offers a brain-dead way to easily create syndicated feeds for sites that don’t use content management systems.
Scot Finnie, publisher of tech newsletter “Scot’s Newsletter” is trying MailbyRSS out, and here’s what he has to say:
Here’s how it works: I email the HTML version of the newsletter to a special email address. From that email, iupload automatically creates an XML version and adds it to the RSS feed that it hosts for me. The theory is that I’ll be able to add that special email address to my HTML newsletter list. Then, whenever I send a new issue of the newsletter, the XML version and RSS feed will be created automatically. Talking with iupload’s David Carter, I learned that the company is looking to make it possible to use their free hosting service just as a pointer to a Web page. For that way of working, authors would access their RSS Feed control panel and insert the headline, link, and abstract for each item, and it would generate an RSS feed that points back to the author’s website. Although it adds a step, this is much more attractive to me.
This is definitely worth checking out as a possible low-end solution for creating RSS feeds for folks who are currently publishing email newsletters, but can’t afford to or don’t want to make the leap to content management solutions.
MailbyRSS is currently offering a free service that is hosted on their servers, and includes some of their branding. They say “we are working on a commercial versions that provide options to remove the branding on templates and to publish your RSS Channels and web pages to the location of your choice. “
That is v. clever use to the email-to-RSS gateways (which had seemed pretty useless to date). Mailbucket.org is a similar service.
Cool… thanks for the additional link. I will check mailbucket out.
How is this different from Zoëaut;?
http://zoe.nu/
I don’t know. What is Zoe?
Hmm, you could use the link
It’s a mail organizer/search engine/intertwingulator. It goes through all your email and organizes it by sender, date, domain (TLD and below), gives you search engine access (Lucene is built it), exports it as RSS, and runs a web interface so you can see it in more detail.
Take a look.
I did take a look, and it looked neat, but there was no readily-avaiable documentation that described in clearly what it does… I’m lazy, and I expect software developers to clearly state what their software does on the homepage.
Thanks, tried the mailbyrss tool… what I found interesting was the fact that it actually creates a blog site as well. I’m suprised the company doesn’t play that up at all.
The inverse, i.e. delivery of RSS feeds into eMail, can be done with IzyNews
http://izynews.com
IzyNews is a new way of receiving news and other RSS feeds in your eMail application. With IzyNews, you can subscribe to thousands of weblogs and professionally syndicated headlines feeds for delivery into eMail folders.
IzyNews is made to work with a broad variety of popular eMail applications, such as
Outlook Express, Outlook, Pocket PC Inbox, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Entourage, Mulberry and many others
It looks like http://www.mailbyrss.com got purchased by Awarenessnetworks.com, and the service is no longer available as a point solution. I’d love to hear of other options if anyone has heard of any.