Offline computing: RSS feeds
So I spent most of my days outside, my laptop under my arm. As part of
my job search, my use case alternated between my text editor and my
email client. I used to spend a lot of time in my text editor because
it was my main work tool during my law studies at university.
But spending a lot of time too in my email client was something quite
new. Being freshly subscribed to various mailing lists as well as to
many newsletters, I saw that I took a lot of pleasure in communicating,
reading, and even learning that way. And I started to think that,
maybe, I could go a little further.
My relationship with content accessible via Internet goes a lot through
RSS feeds. I used snownews(1) for a long time, then newsbeuter(1).
I've also tried to use online clients but, for reasons already
mentioned in previous posts, it never really been my cup of tea. And,
one day, I thought that I could perfectly integrate the feeds that I
follow into my messaging client of choice, mutt(1).
The idea was not necessarily new to me. Indeed, for a few months, I
had used a service that allows to subscribe to various RSS feeds from a
NNTP gateway--the famous gwene.org. I really liked the experience as I
find the use of newsgroups/mails clients really enjoyable. Much more
than RSS feed readers.
They are many ways to follow RSS feeds via emails but my choice went to
rss2email (https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email), a python script
originally written by the late Aaron Swartz. My idea was not to launch
this tool from my laptop every day before leaving to the Big Whole
Outside, but rather to delegate this task to my self-hosted server.
In other words, even before I get up, my home server (a tiny Raspberry
Pi 3B) would--once a day and by itself thanks to a cron task--collect
the additions from my feeds of interest before sending them to the
server managing my mailbox.
And, for me, nothing would be changed in my morning routine which
consists in particular of launching offlineimap(1) to retrieve my
emails for the day--mails that would now include my beloved RSS feeds.
Yes, each day I'd read the news from, at best, the day before but being
offline most of the time, I don't really need to have the last hour
update, do I?
***
Configuration of rss2mail is very easy. We first need to define some
defaults. Here are the interesting part of my rss2email.cfg file:
---8<--- $HOME/.config/rss2email.cfg (snippet)
[DEFAULT]
from = ME@HOMESERVER.TLD # default from:
force-from = True # to avoid errors with some feeds
use-8bit = True # we want that
name-format = {feed-title} # how From: will look like
to = ME@MYMAIL.COM # user mail
user-agent = "Usefull UA"
html-mail = False # I want plain text mails
body-width = 72 # wrap to 72
inline-links = False
links-after-each-paragraph = True
wrap-links = False
date-header = True
date-header-order = modified, issued, created, expired
use-publisher-email = False
feed-timeout = 60
active = True
digest = False
trust-guid = True
trust-link = False
encodings = US-ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, BIG5, ISO-2022-JP
# How new articles will be sent
email-protocol = imap
sendmail = /usr/sbin/sendmail
# for SMTP
smtp-auth = True
smtp-username = ME@MYMAIL.COM
smtp-password = MYPASSWORD
smtp-server = MAIL.PROVIDER.NET:587
smtp-ssl = True
smtp-ssl-protocol = TLSv1
# for IMAP
imap-auth = True
imap-username = ME@MYMAIL.COM
imap-password = MYPASSWORD
imap-server = MAIL.PROVIDER.NET
imap-port = 993
imap-ssl = True
imap-mailbox = RSS # default folder for article storage
--->8---
I guess everything is quite self-explanatory. The important parts are
obviously the mail and the IMAP/SMTP configuration. Note too that I
want all my email to be UTF-8 plain text, not HTML--rss2email will use
html2text/html2markdown to achieve that.
Now to add RSS feeds, there's two way for doing it. From the command
line:
$ r2e add mysupersite https://www.mysuper.site/rss.xml
Or by editing rss2email.cfg manually like so:
---8<--- $HOME/.config/rss2email.cfg (example)
[feed.supersite]
url = https://www.super.site/rss.xml
from = mail@super.site
imap-mailbox = RSS/Folder1
[feed.ohmyexample]
url = https://www.ohmyexample.org/site/allcontent.xml
from = contact@ohmyexample.org
imap-mailbox = RSS/Folder2
--->8---
As we can see, we define a random name for the feed (here, "supersite"
and "ohmyexample"), then we put at least the url of the feed in the
appropriate variable. Personally, all my feeds are stored by theme in
specific folders created for the occasion ("imap-mailbox" variable).
For instance, I have "RSS/News" folder for the newspapers, "RSS/SFFF"
folder for all SciFi-Fantasy related articles, or "RSS/Law" folder for
everything related to legal monitoring.
Plus, when I can find it, I always add the email of the author of the
site (the "from" variable). The advantage being that, if I wish to
respond an article, I can do so directly since I'm already in my mail
client. By pressing "r" in mutt(1) for instance as I do for any other
email. mutt(1), or any other mail client for that matter, being then
responsible for automatically filling in the Subject field with a "Re:
Title of article" and giving me the opportunity to cite the content of
the article. It's really very practical.
When all is set up, it's as easy as a simple "r2e run" from the command
line or in a cron job. (Note that the first time a feed is added, the
option "--no-send" can be used to create the local cache without
actually sending old articles to the mailbox; all is well explained in
the README file in the source tree and/or in the manpage).
Finally, here is what a real article looks like in mutt(1) with its
full header :
---8<--- example mail generated from microlinux.fr RSS feed
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
From: Le blog technique de Microlinux <info@microlinux.fr>
To: f6k@huld.re
Subject: Linus Torvalds et Minix
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2022 06:02:04 -0000
Message-ID: <843525a4-0a76-7898-b7a4-4b606f9654bf@dev.null.invalid>
User-Agent: RSS Reader for huld.re
X-RSS-Feed: https://blog.microlinux.fr/feed/
X-RSS-ID: https://blog.microlinux.fr/?p=2834
X-RSS-URL: https://blog.microlinux.fr/linus-torvalds-minix/
X-RSS-TAGS: Formation,Linus Torvalds,Mac OS,Minix,MS-DOS,PC,Unix
![Disquettes Floppy][1] Début janvier 1991 en Finlande, le jeune
étudiant Linus Torvalds décide d'investir dans du matériel
informatique. Il n'hésite pas à s'endetter sur trois ans pour acheter
ce qui se fait de mieux en matière d'ordinateur personnel : un IBM PC
30386 flambant neuf, équipé d'un processeur 32-bits.
[1]: https://blog.microlinux.fr/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/floppy-disks.png
(...)
--->8---
***
As a conclusion, one can think this may perhaps seem superfluous as a
procedure: download streams from a device at home, to send them to a
remote server, before retrieving them again, but in an other form, from
another machine at home. Why not get the news directly from the
laptop?
One of the reasons for my more and more intensive use of email, and
which I have not mentioned yet, is that I actually quite often happen
to be outside without having my laptop with me. So that, in these
cases, I happen to connect to my provider's webmail application from a
computer that is not mine (for instance at my family's, my friends', or
even at the public library). So it's quite convenient for me that
everything is in one place online.
In the same way, it allows me to retrieve all my content from my
phone's mail client when I have the chance to come across some Wi-Fi to
synchronize with the IMAP server. Again, as with the laptop, a few
minutes of downloading are enough; even if I quickly lose Wi-Fi access,
I can read the feeds articles whenever I want and wherever I want, as
well as my emails, messages on mailing lists, and what's not in my
newsletters, as all is stored inside the phone.