Random Developments

It turns out that there is one major flaw with gatewaying (is this a real word?) RSS feeds to an e-mail app using POP3: if you read more that a handful of feeds, creating filters to sort all of them into folders gets boring real quickly.

The way I implemented the gateway, the generated e-mail has a header line (X-Rsstomail-Channel:) with the URL of the feed, so you can easily filter on it. However, this still leaves you with having to create the folder to receive the messages, and somehow creating the filter (easy on Becky, Alt+drag-and-drop; very hard on Thunderbird, it’s actually easier to write a small Perl script to create the filters than to do it by hand).

The correct way, of course, would be not to use POP3, but IMAP4, and automatically sort the messages into folders on the server side. It turns out that there is a RSS-to-IMAP4 service out there, the Blogstreet Info Aggregator; however, either I did something wrong, or they don’t do the obvious thing (sorting messages into folders), they just dump everything in your inbox. Why using IMAP, then? Beats me.

I didn’t work on this project as much as I wanted to lately, so it is not much different from last time. I will still go the way of the POP3 server at first, simply because it is easier to implement than IMAP4, but I expect to have IMAP4 at some point in the future as well.