Stupid Email Tricks #1

Did you know that mailbucket.org will convert emails sent to any of its addresses to an RSS feed? And not only is it free, there’s not even a sign-up process!

All you have to do is go to the following address in a web browser:

http://www.mailbucket.org/USERNAME.xml

where USERNAME is the user name you’d like to use with Mailbucket. If you see an existing RSS feed, try another user name. If you see “No Messages” then you can assume that that user name is available. You can then use USERNAME@mailbucket.org as your email address and http://www.mailbucket.org/USERNAME.xml as your RSS feed’s address. Any email sent to USERNAME@mailbucket.org will be converted to RSS and pushed out to your client.

Why would anyone want to do this? Maybe you’re on several mailing lists, and rather than get 300 emails a day you’d prefer getting 300 RSS posts a day. Maybe you use an “online” RSS reader like Google Reader and want to access the information in the email\feeds from many computers. Maybe your company won’t allow you to receive personal emails at work, but is OK with you getting an RSS feed. Maybe your group\team needs to share information and would rather use RSS instead of email.

Whatever the case may be, this is still a pretty neat trick. I’m subscribed to several Yahoo! Groups, and instead of getting dozens of emails every day in several different folders, they all just come as RSS feeds into a single folder. Neat!

WARNING: Anyone can subscribe to this RSS feed simply by entering any random USERNAME into the Mailbucket address in their RSS client. So it’s best not to forward anything confidential and\or sensitive to your mailbucket address.

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