Introduction
Using the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) for your email account(s) enables you to get an always up-to-date view of your inbox: You can use different mail clients (on different machines) to access your mails and all mails are stored on a server which makes restoring your mails very easy in case of the machine running your mail client crashes.
Feed2Imap enables you to organize/aggregate your feeds using your IMAP account. In detail Feed2Imap downloads the feeds and saves them as emails into a folder on an IMAP account.
Using an IMAP account brings some advantages:
- Always up-to-date view on your feeds
- No need for additional software (use your favorite mail client)
- Use one filter/rule-set for mails and feeds
- No need for a (commercial) feed aggregator
- One backup strategy for mails and feeds
There are some drawbacks and requirements that should be mentioned:
- Feed2Imap needs to run periodically to fetch new feeds (e.g. as cronjob).
- There is no comfortable interface to add or delete feeds.
Setup / Configuration
I installed Feed2Imap under Ubuntu 9.10 using the Ubuntu package:
# apt-get install feed2imap |
To configure Feed2Imap just create a file called .feed2imaprc in your home directory that defines:
- Which feeds should be fetched
- in which IMAP-folders the feeds should be saved as emails,
- and which sender address should be used.
The file is structured as follows:
feeds: - name: sender-name-1 url: http://url-to-feed-1/ target: imap://your-username:your-password@your-imap-server/imap-folder-to-save-the-feeds-as-emails - name: sender-name-2 url: http://url-to-feed-2/ target: imap://your-username:your-password@your-imap-server/imap-folder-to-save-the-feeds-as-emails |
Since you have to store your password in the configuration file it is strongly recommended to change the file permissions to 600.
Running
# feed2imap-dumpconfig |
tests your configuration file and lists all IMAP accounts Feed2Imap will connect to and all feeds that will be fetched.
Running
# feed2imap |
triggers Feed2IMAP manually. If any problems occur, you can use -d flag to enable the debug mode. If everything works fine you can set up a cronjob to periodically run Feed2Imap (e.g. every 30 minutes during the day):
*/30 0,7-23 * * * /usr/bin/feed2imap > /dev/null 2>&1 |
Optionally, you can save the output to a logfile with a cron entry like:
*/30 0,7-23 * * * /usr/bin/feed2imap -d > /home/your-username/log/feed2imap.log 2>&1 |