I'm never quite sure whether Advent should run 24 or 25 days, so if you're of the "24" persuasion, consider today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent a bonus 🙂

Today it's rss2email¹, which is I read my RSS feeds². I prefer to read my RSS via email for a number of reasons:

• I don't need to learn Yet Another Set of Keyboard Bindings because I already know my MUA's key-bindings

• I can use any standards-compliant MUA to read my RSS feeds, whether I have them delivered to my mbox file and read with mail(1), or delivered to my normal mail account and read them via mutt/neomutt/Claws/Thunderbird/whatever

• I have offline access via OfflineIMAP/mbsync and any changes (deleting entries, read-status, flagging, stars, tags, filing, etc) gets synced back up to my server, even across multiple machines

• I have all the filtering power of my MUA

• plenty of utilities also speak IMAP, so I can write scripts to (post-)process my RSS feed too

• sharing an interesting article with friends is as simple as forwarding an email

• my backup process for email also automatically backs up my RSS feeds too

• because it runs from cron(8) on a schedule I establish, I have more control of my distractions (I usually run it around 4am gathering feeds for me to read with breakfast). I found if it ran hourly or even multiple times per day, I'd get sucked into constantly checking to see if anything new/interesting had arrived

• control remains with me on my machine rather than handing my reading habits over to some 3rd party RSS reader-service

And I love RSS because it is a pull rather than a push. If I subscribe to your email newsletter, I have to trust that you'll respect my email address and not share it or lose control of it, and cutting off email subscriptions is sketchy. But with RSS? I just stop polling that feed if I'm done with it and it's gone.

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¹ https://github.com/wking/rss2email

² https://blog.thechases.com/posts/reading-rss-feeds-via-email-on-the-cli/