# feeds2email - send news feeds by email Retrieve all your RSS, Atom or RDF feeds, read them to detect new articles, and then send them to you by email.

• homepage: https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email
• license: Simplified BSD License (see COPYING)

Features

• Supported formats:
  • RSS
  • Atom
  • RDF/RSS
• Works with all feeds:
  • support HTTP and HTTPS thanks to curl,
  • support user-defined HTTP User Agent (eg. for servers with strict anti-spam policies),
  • support user-defined HTTP cookies (eg. for authentication),
  • support crazy servers that returns XML with HTML Content-Type.
• Easy to setup.
• User-friendly CLI interface.
• Portable: use only Bash shell, curl, some common tools and some Python.
• Be respectful with publishers:
  • use HTTP Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since headers whenever possible,
  • use HTTP ETag header whenever possible,
  • use a dedicated User Agent feeds2email/<version> (https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email).

Installation

Build the man page as normal user: make all

Then install as root: make install

It requires help2man, bash, curl, xmlstarlet, Python html2text, logger, md5sum, awk, sed, tr, find, grep, mail, base64, and mktemp.

Uninstall

Just run make uninstall.

Usage

All commands hereafter are run with your normal user, not with root.

Configure

Configure the sender email address:

$ feeds2email config email-from [email protected]

Configure your name and email address:

$ feeds2email config email-to 'John Snow <[email protected]>'

Add news feeds

Add new feeds as follow:

$ feeds2email add https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Update the feeds

Manually update the feeds as follow:

$ feeds2email update

The output is quite verbose, you may run it in quiet mode (only warnings and errors are printed):

$ feeds2email --quiet update

Use cron to update your feeds periodically:

$ crontab -e

then add the line below to update the feeds every 2 hours:

5 */2 * * * /usr/local/bin/feeds2email --quiet update

To filter the emails in your favorite email client, use:

• the sender address as configured previously,
• the general X-Rss header that is set to 1,
• the specific X-RSS-Feed header that contains the feed URI.

Maintenance operations

Print the current configuration:

$ feeds2email config

Print the existing feeds:

$ feeds2email list

Add a new feed:

$ feeds2email add https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Delete an existing feed:

$ feeds2email del https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Disable an existing feed (feed won't be updated any more):

$ feeds2email disable https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Enable back an existing feed (feed will be updated again):

$ feeds2email disable https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Update one single feed:

$ feeds2email update https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Update all feeds:

$ feeds2email update

Print the status of an existing feed:

$ feeds2email status https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Print the status of the feeds in error:

$ feeds2email status

Workarounds

Publishers that block unknown HTTP User Agents

Some publishers blocks HTTP requests with unknown User Agents. They probably try to stop robots, spammers, or even unknown probably-badly-implemented news readers. Here is how to workaround the problem.

You may try the following trick if feeds2email reports HTTP 403 Forbidden for that feed:

$ feeds2email status https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom`
...
HTTP status..... HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
...

Define a fake User Agent for feeds2email to use with such feeds (better choose a well-known one such as the one of Mozilla Firefox):

$ feeds2email config fake-user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0'

Now, tell feeds2email to fake the HTTP User Agent for the problematic feed:

$ feeds2email del https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom
$ feeds2email add https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom fake-user-agent

Finally, try again to update the feed:

$ feeds2email update https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Authentication using cookies

Some feeds might be protected by some authentication mechanism based on HTTP cookies. Here is how to workaround the problem.

Tell feeds2email to use some cookies for the problematic feed:

$ feeds2email del https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom
$ feeds2email add https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom cookie=$( echo "var1=val1; var2=val2; var3=val3" | base64 --wrap=0 )

Then, try again to update the feed:

$ feeds2email update https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Handling XML served as HTML

Some HTTP servers are kind of crazy. They serve XML content with the text/html Content-Type. Whether this is a bug in the server's code or in its configuration doesn't help to get the feed content. Here is how to workaround the problem.

Tell feeds2email not to check for the Content-Type for the problematic feed:

$ feeds2email del https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom
$ feeds2email add https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom no-content-type

Then, try again to update the feed:

$ feeds2email update https://github.com/didier-barvaux/feeds2email/commits/master.atom

Thanks

Thanks to thuban [email protected] and his srss software for the ideas: http://git.yeuxdelibad.net/srss/