Read RSS Feeds in your Email

I have long thought RSS feeds belong in email and not a web browser. Why? Because once inside my email I "own" it. I can save it and reference it whenever I want even if I'm offline (assuming I download my email to my computer). Also to me it just feels more natural to read feeds in my email than anywhere else. If your RSS reader is sitting at around 7,000 unread articles you might question the wisdom of marrying your email to RSS feeds, but hear me out.

I am a big fan of GMail. The power of GMail lies in the fact that you have over 6 GB of storage and a powerful search tool. I subscribe to many email lists. I don't necessarily read everything that comes across, but I do archive it so I can search for information later. I was looking for a way to do the same with certain RSS feeds. Note I didn't say all RSS feeds. 43 Folders and Lifehacker post valuable information throughout the day, information I want to have at my fingertips. Perhaps you want to save your daughter's Flickr photostream of your new grandchild in your email. Or maybe you have a hobby and want to keep track of others with the same hobby and reference their information. Or recipes. Or how-to articles.

Both Thunderbird and Apple Mail 3 have built-in RSS readers. If there's a post you want to save you can simply copy it to a local folder. If you use a service like GMail or AIM Mail with IMAP you can copy the post into your webmail account. But there's an even better way! RSS to email services. Two I like right now are RSSFwd and SendMeRSS. Both are free and will send RSS feeds right into your inbox.

Now you're an Inbox Zero sort of techie, right? If not you'd better be! You can use GMail's filters to tag incoming feeds. Be sure to check "Skip Inbox" when you setup the filter. I also suggest using the "+" sign. What is this? Suppose your email address is john.doe@gmail.com. If you subscribe to 43 Folders you can sign up using john.doe+43folders@gmail.com. This will still arrive in your GMail account and it gives GMail something to key off of for filtering purposes.