Forward Email To RSS

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 14, 2008
Updated • Mar 25, 2014
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We have shown you yesterday how you can forward RSS news to Email. Today it is the other way round by reviewing the service MailOnFeed which creates RSS news feeds from emails that you receive to one of your accounts.

The basic principle of the service is straightforward. You add one or multiple email accounts that support IMAP to the Mail On Feed profile to turn them into news feeds that you can then access using RSS readers.

You can subscribe to the email news feed in any news reader, for instance Opera Mail, Thunderbird, or any of the online-only readers. All incoming mail is displayed here so that you can read the mails in the feed reader.

Why would someone want to do that? The only practical issue that comes to mind is to publish the news feed on a website so that multiple users would have access to the email. It could also be interesting in situations where multiple users need read access to email accounts but that's configurable in mail clients as well.

There is not really a reason to use this service independently, at least none that we could think of while reviewing it. Many users will (rightfully) dislike the fact that they have to supply the authentication information of their email account on the website to enable the service. Another aspect is that the latest news entry on the company's blog dates back to last year. The project feels abandoned.

Can you think of another reason why someone would want to forward email to RSS?

Update: The original service that we reviewed here is no longer available.We have found an alternative that you can make use of instead. Emails 2 RSS is a free service that you can make use of to forward emails to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. The author explains how to configure the application with Gmail in detail, but it should work with all services supporting forwarding.

The way it works is very simple - service provides a generated email address(es) for you. All incoming emails received by the particular address goes to correspond RSS feed.
Usage is pretty straightforward - you setup forwarding rules on your email service that catch emails based on some criteria forward them to the email address given by the service and delete/archive the email. And then you subscribe to the given RSS feed address with your favorite RSS Reader.

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Comments

  1. Steve said on May 5, 2014 at 4:25 pm
    Reply

    I subscribe to auto-email updates from 3 web services, neither have RSS feeds. I in-turn would like to parse the URL only from the body of the emails and aggregate them into a single RSS feed that I can post on my website. Currently, I do this manually.

  2. Francisco said on November 18, 2011 at 5:32 pm
    Reply

    I’ve found indeed this article because I want to forward my email newsletters to my RSS reader. The reason is very simple, I receive many RSS news in my RSS reader and some email newletters in my email account, so I want to read all of them in a single place.

    And yes, I wouldn’t like to share with someone else my email’s user and password, so I think I’m going to have the news in two places. Maybe Google could implement this in Google Reader, so you can use its email account to read newsletters too :-).

  3. michel cmp said on May 12, 2010 at 9:12 pm
    Reply

    Would llike to read incoming emails at hotel that blocks email on its public computer. This seems like a good way to do it.

    QUESTION
    HOW DO YOOU ESTABLISH 2 WAY COMMUNICATION WHEN THERE IS NO ACCESS TO EMAIL?
    IS THERE A WAY TO REPLY TO AN RSS ?

    1. Leksyk said on January 14, 2011 at 4:27 pm
      Reply

      You can create rules on your email service to forward some emails to service like http://emails2rss.appspot.com and then move forwarded emails to another folder or tag or to trash and mark them as read. And then if you need to respond on the email you could do it via email service.

  4. gary said on January 20, 2010 at 3:10 pm
    Reply

    A reason why I would want to send e mail to rss.. yes.. suppose i want to update my website with a product announcement, or special price.. normally i would have to edit the page and re post the whole thing.. (hey i havent figured another way yet ) but with an RSS feed on my site.. i just post to the feed, and wallah.. it appears on my site.. cool or what..
    ok if i was running a Blog, it would be easier.. just make a Post.. but my site is not a Blog.

    I havent implemented this yet.. still checking it out..
    thanks

  5. Martin K said on December 4, 2009 at 1:13 am
    Reply

    When it comes to one-way communication email is God awful. As a graduate student and political activist I receive 20-30 emails a day, most of which are not sent specifically to me, thus do not warrant a response. Even though I have a few thousand unread items in my RSS feed list it doesn’t bother me. If I simply don’t have time to look at the newest internet comic or international news headlines I don’t look at them and they’re not in my way.

  6. Nic said on October 17, 2009 at 6:25 am
    Reply

    Here’s another way to use it:
    With an RSS app added to a Facebook “Page” and using this email-to-RSS, it means I can do the monthly mailouts and keep FB up to date in one go.

  7. Hilary Ellis said on October 5, 2009 at 10:08 pm
    Reply

    Yes, I am trying to find ways to cheaply communicate with friends and family while out of the country. Although it is $3.99 a min to call US from French Polynesia (also $0.75 text and there is NO internet) it is free for me to email from my phone. Setting up an RSS will be a great way to let some of my normal FB or Twitter followers know what is happening.

  8. kobayashi said on June 8, 2009 at 11:03 am
    Reply

    i want to be alerted to items that may interest me on ebay. ebay has a saved search feature that will update e daily with new items for auction that meet my saved search criteria, but the only method of notification available to me is email. i would much rather browse these results through my rss reader than go to my inbox for them, and so would love some kind of service that could act as a workaround solution and convert the emails to rss.

  9. amna said on May 8, 2009 at 10:37 am
    Reply

    yes, because many employees are sending forward emails and jokes to other employees, while this is not profesional, we – IT dept. – want to make users send to an email specific for sharing these things and thatr email would go to RSS blog, whiever is interested should go there and read rather than having it come into their mailboxes.

  10. Jc said on March 16, 2009 at 5:38 pm
    Reply

    I’m not able to access any personal email from work – but I can access a feed reader. So turning my email into feeds may enable me to check important email’s at work.

  11. Chris Flood said on March 5, 2009 at 8:02 pm
    Reply

    I agree with the gist of the post that there’s not a huge reason for this tool other than to share email content. Cleaning out your inbox and subscribing to mail-only news/updates can be done by setting up email subscriptions with services like Bloglines and NewsGator, which does not require any independent tool for mail to rss conversion.

  12. Simon Raistrick said on March 2, 2009 at 10:00 pm
    Reply

    Reasons why someone would want RSS to email:
    To declutter the inbox – send all your group mailing lists to an RSS feed instead and read them in Google reader etc – apart from decluttering your inbox it also means you dont have to syncronise masses of mail list emails when mobile etc -you view them seperately in your RSS reader. I guess it also groups similar content, as RSS and mail lists have a lot in common, as opposed to personal emails.

  13. Paul said on February 23, 2009 at 12:51 am
    Reply

    Site unavailable now, but I found http://torss.net which do the same, but not required any registration and also can generate for you own random email address, so POP or IMAP not required

  14. Corrina said on January 16, 2009 at 7:58 pm
    Reply

    I plan to use a mail 2 rss service to deal with NYC’s MTA subway alerts. They send out about 15 / hr, and it’s clogging up my mailbox. Unfortunately, they haven’t set up rss yet.

  15. Michael Mattan said on January 5, 2009 at 9:23 pm
    Reply

    I found the following very interesting online service: http://www.mail2feed.org
    This is a very good service that offers you the possibility to read your email as an RSS feed.

  16. Chris said on December 29, 2008 at 7:08 pm
    Reply

    Email to rss is a great way to get newsletters you want by not cluttering your inbox – I read rss when I have time and that’s how I’d like to read newsletters. I just setup blogger blogs for each newsletter and forward them to the blogger email – it adds them to the feed and I have them marked as read in gmail so it’s like they never came in there.

  17. Mba said on December 28, 2008 at 5:18 pm
    Reply

    I have a media extended that can subscribe to rss feeds but not email. This would be useful for email on it.

  18. Rarst has cool feed said on November 14, 2008 at 6:34 pm
    Reply

    I am writing my own email2RSS app (not at working stage yet). My reasoning is that native email cliient on Symbian totally no good and there are no decent alternatives. So I am thinking about trying RSS feed from email in Opera Mini.

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