Skip to main content

Moving Incoming Newsletters and Alerts to RSS

Spam and inbox overload is one of the unavoidable pains of an active online life, right? Well, not necessarily so. There are a few proven techniques for how to get rid of unwanted e-mail from your inbox. One of them is to be very restrictive about giving out your personal e-mail address, another involves investing in advanced anti-spam filters. But how do you go about signing up for newsletters and other information from sites that you are not trusting?

I am happy with my current setup for solving these problems and thought that I would share it with you.

The service I am using is free and called MailBucket. It is simply an email address with the suffix "@mailbucket.org" that is free for you to claim. Let's say you want to use the e-mail address joe@mailbucket.org - you simply type this address in the e-mail field when subscribing to for example a newsletter. Then add a subscription in your favorite RSS reader to http://www.mailbucket.org/joe.xml and read the incoming messages from there. Of course, this setup does not allow you to easily reply to messages but typically this is not anything you will do when subscribed to a newsletter. If you eventually decide that you don't want to receive their messages any longer you simply delete the feed from your RSS reader. To find a unique e-mail address I am building my username (the part before the @ in the e-mail address) by using a unique prefix, a dash ("-"), and the name of the service (for example joe-bookcrossing@mailbucket.org). You can find out more about MailBucket's excellent free service at http://www.mailbucket.org.

Of course it is not advisable to use a MailBucket address when signing up for a service where a secret password or other confidential information will be sent to you, because all feeds are public and unprotected. For a few months I have been a happy user, subscribing to news alerts from for example BookCrossing and TopCoder as well as various Yahoo Groups. It also automatically provides me with a convenient way of categorizing my incoming messages compared with using my regular e-mail address for everything.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HOWTO: Fix a Broken Laptop Lid for $1

A few months ago my laptop lid's hinges gave up and my lid kept falling over. I will show you how I fixed the problem in five minutes by using materials for $1. But first some background info. At first, I assumed there would be a quick and simple fix to this common laptop problem. My laptop is an Evo N800v. HP has bought Compaq since I purchased the computer so that's where I'm supposed to turn for help. I was kind of startled to hear that HP support wanted $500 for fixing the broken hinges - presumably they intended to replace the entire lid. Obviously, shelling out $500 for fixing a 6 year old laptop is not the way to go, so I started to look for alternative solutions. First, I disassembled the laptop numerous times, trying to make the hinges more sturdy (that's spelled S-U-P-E-R-G-L-U-E). Anyway, that didn't help. Option number two was to do something similar to what user xrobevansx did on instructables.com . Basically he bought a lid support in a hardware store...
19 comments
Read more

HOWTO: GTD with Google Docs & PocketMod

Take control of your unwieldy to do-list by combining Google Docs and PocketMod. With the system described here you will always be ready to take notes, and never run the risk of losing an idea! Update (July 30, 2009): Now using a Google Docs template. I use a subset of GTD (" Getting Things Done ") by having a digital copy of my next actions, sorted by context (@Home, @Office, @Shopping, @Computer, etc.). This lets me easily look up what I need to do, depending on where I am. However, a digital copy is not very useful by itself, since it is not accessible when I am offline. Putting it in my PDA is not ideal either, since the overhead of adding a new note is too big (turning on the device, opening the right application, having it recognize my handwriting). That's why I print out my to-do list on paper once a week and carry it in my pocket. It's the ideal way of accessing and editing tasks. Before I print out a new list I spend a minute or two copying the edits from my...
5 comments
Read more

Reading on Paper vs. on Screen

One of the basic premises behind FeedJournal is that it's better to read text on paper than on a screen. While it might not sound like a bold assumption, it still is an assumption and as such worth to examine deeper. Today, office workers and many other professionals are required to focus their eyes on a computer screen during most of their work day. Many of them continue to use the computer at home. FeedJournal was created with many goals in mind; one of them is to release you from the screen while enabling you to read the content you love. You shouldn't have to spend more time reading off a screen, just because you want to access fresh and relevant content. Recent research has found that reading a longer text on paper is 25% faster than reading the same text on a computer screen. At the same time, reading comprehension and article overview are improved. Although screen resolutions have increased and font rendering technologies such as ClearType make it much easier to rea...
11 comments
Read more