Receiving RSS Updates Via Email

If you’re like me, you rely on your email for everything in your life.  My email delivers my latest Facebook notifications, Nagios warnings, text messages (thanks to Google Voice), and oh I guess email too.

I have push email notifications on my mobile devices, as do a lot of people.

Some websites offer RSS feeds of information which is important to you, but don’t offer an option to receive an email.

Yes, you could set this up for any RSS feed, but this quick guide will focus on setting up email notifications for Reddit comment responses and Reddit messages.

Another interesting application for this might be to receive emails when your favorite Podcasts are updated, or if you want to get an email when your favorite blog posts a new update.

Reddit is a very real-time social website, and having instant notifications of events on Reddit could be very useful, however since Reddit doesn’t even require an email address to register, they’re not offering the functionality.

What You’ll Need:

• An RSS feed to subscribe to.
• An email address to send the notifications to.
• A Linux server which is always online, which you can create cron jobs on.

Let’s Begin
This is the only part of this guide which requires root access to the server.  We will be using RSS2Email, which is a free program available for Linux.  If you are using Ubuntu, it is right in the repositories for you.

If you do not have root access to your server, but you do have SSH access, it may still be possible to use this program if you compile it yourself.  You can get the source code here.

sudo apt-get install rss2email

Setting Up RSS2Email
The setup is mind-numbingly easy!  If your email address is you@example.com, and your RSS feed link is http://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.rss?feed=123foo456bar789&user=MyAwesomeUsername, you could use this syntax to set up your feed.

r2e new you@example.com

r2e add http://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.rss?feed=123foo456bar789\&user=MyAwesomeUsername

r2e run

Important: Reddit RSS feeds for your Inbox, etc, have an ampersand (&) before your username.  If you do not escape this ampersand by putting a slash in front of it (\&) your feed will not work!

On The First Run, you may receive a high volume of email.  In fact, it was enough to cause my sendmail server to exceed its rate limit and throw a ton of email to the deferred queue.  But, it did eventually all send.  A lot of the first emails will be old RSS data you have already seen before.  After that, on subsequent runs, you will only receive updates.

Where Can I Find My Reddit Inbox Feed Link?
If you login to Reddit, and go to Preferences, you’ll find an “RSS Feeds” on the top of the page.  The direct link is https://ssl.reddit.com/prefs/feeds/.

Using RSS2Email
You can very easily add and delete feeds from your R2E configuration.

Add new feeds the same way you added the first one:  r2e add http://www.feedwebsite.com/feed

Delete old feeds by running r2e list, then r2e delete # where # is the number corresponding to the feed you want to delete.

Scheduling RSS2Email
Obviously, you will only receive updates when r2e is run manually.  So, an easy way to receive routine updates is to cron the command.

crontab -e

To receive updates every 10 minutes, add a line like this to your crontab.

*/10 *  * * * /usr/bin/r2e run

To receive updates every 1 minute, add a line like this to your crontab.

* *  * * * /usr/bin/r2e run

You’re Done!
You should now receive emails at your designated time intervals when the RSS feed has new updates!