Recommendations for mail to RSS aggregator

[dkozinn]

I'd like to be able to monitor via RSS some of my mailboxes, particularly a few that I keep around that seldom get any mail in them. So far, I found Mailfeed (http://wiki.wonko.com/software/mailfeed/) which looks like it may do the trick, but I was wondering if anyone else had something they are using and could recommend? (For now, at least, I'm only planning to look at mailboxes hosted here, but the ability to access any server would be good, as would the ability to deal with multiple mailboxes without having to either pass in parameters in cleartext or put multiple copies of the script all over the place, as looks to be the case with Mailfeed.)

I realize that there is going to be a security risk by doing this at all, but I'm not particularly concerned for the mailboxes that I'll be monitoring.

[Matt]

I can't really provide any insight on this question, but I will say that using RSS to view e-mail is a new and interesting application. I can however provide an alternative: you can use Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/) with its built-in RSS aggregator (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_RSS_Basics) to handle e-mail and RSS feeds.

[dkozinn]

Using Thunderbird would be fine, but it doesn't really solve the problem that I'm trying to work out. Specifically, during my "day job" I want to be able to monitor multiple mailboxes. (Yes, I could do all kinds of stuff with forwarding headers to my mobile phone, etc., but I don't need that.) Unfortunately, I can't use POP or IMAP directly from work, and keeping a bunch of different Horde or Squirrelmail sessions open isn't a good option. The idea was that I'd have an RSS feed from the host (I can get to RSS, since it "looks like" web traffic) which I could monitor with whatever flavor of RSS reader I want to use. (Lately, I've been playing with RSS Bandit (http://rssbandit.org) which I like a lot for use on my Windoze machines).

So, the idea is that I do the aggregation on the server side, and just pass down the info for RSS. If I need the whole message, I can always log onto Horde and get it then.

As I noted in my first message, the other use is for some mailboxes that don't get stuff in them often, but when they do, I need to check it. From home, I can have my mail client check those mailboxes, but I sort of liked the idea of doing it via RSS anyway.

Unless someone comes up with something else, I may just take that mailfeed as a starting point and hack it to deal with multiple mailboxes, etc.

[dkozinn]

As a follow-up, I did use mailfeed.php (as mentioned in my original message). It does seem to work reasonably well, though I had to make a minor tweak because the default character set caused errors in my RSS reader (and caused the feed not to validate) when a "bad" character crept into an email. (Apparently I got a message composed on a Mac, or some other machine that set the high-order bit of the character.) Other than that, it does seem work pretty well.

If anyone is interested let me know and I'll give you the (slightly) modified source code.

As to the solution for multiple mailboxes, for now, I've just got a couple of different versions with the mailbox info hardcoded in, I run whichever is appropriate. Also, I have password protected the subdirectory where the program is located to make it a bit more challenging for someone to peek at.

In case it's not obviously, there are some fairly serious security risks with doing this, since the text is passed completely in the clear, so you don't want to be doing this for any mailbox where you care about the contents being private.