Using Email as Your RSS Manger

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With the Google Reader end of life announcement earlier this year I have been looking for an RSS manager solution. After much browsing and consideration I have found the ideal solution; email over IMAP

My RSS reader solution needed two things, access from any device I had and synchronization of metadata between devices so that I never missed a thing. After looking around at many solutions such as The Old Reader I realized that email did what I wanted better than Google Reader ever did.

The benefits of email are better management and already-done sync. I get better management because I get better control over when I get rid of something. Rather than just having "read" and "unread" I manually delete items I have finished with, meaning that I never loose an article before I am done with it. "Already-done sync" is because it is inside my mail account all of my devices (and my webmail) synced as soon as I got my first message, no extra syncing to set up.

Doing it!

Many feeds provide email notifications and if not I use the fantastic Blogtrottr service to get emails about any feed. It supports PubSubHubbub for really fast notifications but falls back to polling if it isn't available.

Managing It!

The problem now is that if you subscribe to a lot of feeds you will get a lot of emails in your inbox. The simple solution is to filter them. There are many solutions, for example Blogtrottr sends all mail from the same address so you can filter based on that and stick your feed updates in a folder or apply a label. My preferred method is using a "+ address" which is supported by some mail servers. Generally if there is a plus sign in the username part of the email address it is sent to the base portion and the info after the plus is used by the receiver for some reason. For example a social network might allow email replies to post+POSTID@social.example.net and it can use the POSTID to tell what post you are replying to. I use +ni for "not important" and know to check that stuff when I get a chance to catch up on the news. I put these in their own folder and turn off notifications for that folder in all of my email clients so that they don't bother me.

There you go, your synchronized, cross-device, easy to use, well supported RSS/Atom/whatever feed manager. I have been using this for a while now and am really enjoying it. Goodbye Google Reader, you wont be missed.