Rmail was puzzling me for a while. It’s a free service which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and it will email you the latest entries. Now this is cool, but why would anyone want this? If you want to read your feeds offline any Feedreader will do without cluttering your inbox. If you are online anyways Bloglines or Rojo probably do a better job.

But throw in Gmail with its advanced search possibilities into the mix, and what you get is a personalized and searchable repository of your favorite ressources.

Two things are good to know:

(1) Gmail supports the “+” addressing scheme which gives you unlimited unique addresses (yourname+whatever@gmail.com) for a single Gmail account (yourname@gmail.com).

(2) Gmail allows you to create filters based on rules you can define.

So if you subscribe to how to save the world in Rmail using the email address yourname+howtosavetheworld@gmail.com and you define a filter in Gmail labeling it correspondingly and archiving it immediately, you start to collect one of the finest ressources around without further intervention. Subscribe to 50 or 1000 more feeds and wait for a year or two, and you’ll have built a handselected pool of interesting stuff…

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Comments:
Awesome. Just one point. I have a bug that prevents + in the email address. I’ll go fix it right now.
posted by Randy Charles Morin : 6/30/2005 10:48:36 PM

I must have already fixed it. I can’t reproduce it right now.
posted by Randy Charles Morin : 6/30/2005 10:53:53 PM

self healing software ;)
- I’ve been using it without any problems.
posted by saurierduval : 6/30/2005 11:05:01 PM

I just got the R|mail alert myself using the technique you describe for this blog entry. I’ll have to create a screencast about this new amazing use of R|mail. Personally, I use to think R|mail was crap too ;) And I wrote it.
posted by Randy Charles Morin : 6/30/2005 11:08:21 PM

I find R|mail is slow. http://www.rssfwd.com is much fast (sends you rss feeds within the hour or two that they are published). I have found that R|mail sometimes (most of the times) sends me headlines that are a day late (sometimes mentioning something that happend yesterday as tomorrow… two days late).
posted by Anonymous : 12/18/2005 03:48:30 AM