Feeds2Gmail

Similar to the venerable rss2email, but:

Creates emails directly in your Gmail account using IMAP APPEND.

This has a number of advantages over sending emails:

• Faster.

• No chance to be flagged as Spam.

• No other deliverability issues.

• Can place directly in appropriate mailbox (a.k.a. folder a.k.a. label). Speaking of which...

Each email is put in two special IMAP mailboxes

In Gmail, that means each post is tagged with two labels -- Feeds and Feeds/<feed-name>.

This way, you can read a mix of feeds, or, focus on posts from just one feed. Much like you could in Google Reader.

Multiple devices

IMAP means you can read feeds on multiple devices, and keep in sync:

• The posts.

• Which posts you've read.

• Which posts you've starred.

Written in Racket rather than in Python.

Just because I love Racket.

Note: I almost got this working as a Google Apps Script. That would have let this run using GAS scheduling, without you having to schedule run it on some computer of your own. The hitch? There is nothing like IMAP APPEND (letting you specify a folder) available in the Google Apps Script environment.

Editorial

Using Gmail for this this works so well, it makes you wonder why Google didn't do this.

Maybe Google's decision to shut off Google Reader was never really about viability and maintenace costs. Instead, maybe the motivation was deprecating RSS and Atom feeds in favor of proprietary monocultures like Twitter, Facebook, and maybe oh say Google+.

Install

Dev build of Racket

The imap-append function from Racket's net/imap module was updated to take an optional list of IMAP flags. We need this so we can set the flags to '(), rather than the default '(\Seen) --- that way the new emails appear as unread rather than read.

This enhanced imap-append is not yet in the 5.3.6 release version of Racket. As a result, you must use the pre-release, development version of Racket. You can either build Racket from source or install a nightly build of Racket.

Packages

This requires #lang rackjure and http packages not supplied with Racket. To install:

$ raco pkg install rackjure
$ raco pkg install http

Configure

Create a .feeds2gmail file in your home directory:

email = <you>@gmail.com
password = <password>

Adding feeds

Add one

Run with --add-feed <feed-uri> to add a single feed. URIs must be a full URI including scheme, e.g. http://www.example.com not just www.example.com.

Import many

Run with the --import-feeds <file> flag to add feeds from file, which should have one feed URI per line. URIs must be a full URI including scheme, e.g. http://www.example.com not just www.example.com.

Environment

I run this on Amazon EC2 using Amazon Linux 64-bit using the Racket build for Fedora 12 x64. The crontab runs it @hourly.

Why Gmail not IMAP?

I coded this to be Gmail-specific because that seems like the main use case -- people wanting a Google Reader replacment. However there's very little that's Gmail-specific. Mainly this lets the .feeds2gmail config file not need to specify a few IMAP connection settings. If you'd use this with another IMAP server, please either let me know and I'll try to add, or, submit a pull request which I'd happily accept.