Replacing Google Reader with rss2email
2013-05-17
So Google is killing the Reader service. This has caused quite an uproar in the technology community. As a longtime user (since 2008) of Google Reader, I went in search of a replacement.
I had used NewsBlur, newsbeuter, and even thought about creating my own RSS fetcher. But in the end, all of these options were lacking. A while back I had checked out ]rss2email](http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/about/), but had dropped it because I wanted fresh deliveries of feeds which involved having a computer running at all times. I realized my VPS would now fulfill that requirement perfectly.
rss2email is exactly what it sounds like: "a free tool for delivering news from RSS feeds to your email program that works under Windows and UNIX, including Linux, Mac OS X, BSD and CentOS." I am using it with Ubuntu so installing it was as easy as:
sudo apt-get install rss2email
To start it up, you'll want to tell rss2email what email address to send the feeds to:
r2e new youremail@domain.com
Then add feeds with the add
command:
r2e add https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
You can check out the feeds you have added:
r2e list
Delete them by the number beside them in r2e list
:
r2e delete 2
Make an initial run (without dumping every entry into your email):
r2e run --no-send
Then run rss2email at any time to get new entries:
r2e run
I added an entry to my crontab to grab feeds every 4 hours:
0 */4 * * * r2e run
rss2email has the added benifit of allowing you to use your email client or service to filter messages. For instance, I use a filter to send all my feeds to an "RSS" folder where I can read them at my leisure.
You can get more info on setting up rss2email at this getting started page: http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/getting-started-with-rss2email/ and Arch Linux's doc for rss2email: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rss2email.
In the end, I'm disappointed in Google for shutting Reader down. This reminds me of other services I use Google for that could be cancelled some day: Google Voice, Google Calendar, GMail. I understand that they have a business to protect, so it's not out of the question that anything could be up for killing. I'm considering moving to paid services that have a better business model than selling ads based on crawling the content of my personal communications.