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