Email as a Universal Feed Reader

I was chatting with some friends on IRC about RSS feeds and elfeed came up. While elfeed is great, it has some real limitations - try forwarding a feed item as an email, or converting it to HTML for further processing (like turning it into Org mode notes). These pain points got me thinking.

Three years ago, I switched to mu4e for email management and fell in love with how extensible it is. The query system is incredible - you can find exactly the emails you want with surgical precision.

Then it hit me: why not use this same powerful interface for everything? RSS feeds, newsletters, email subscriptions, Reddit, YouTube - all in one unified view. The approach seemed so intuitive to me that I’m genuinely surprised more people don’t do this.

Here’s my current setup that gives me a single dashboard for all content (It’s Ridiculously Simple):

1. Install rss2email; plenty of guides online for this. Add all your feeds and configure it to use a unique identifier (I use myusername+feeds@mymailprovider.com as the sender address).
2. Set up email filtering; Create a rule in your email provider to catch anything with your unique RSS identifier and automatically file it into an /rss folder. The trickier part is manually moving your existing newsletters and subscriptions into this folder too, but it’s a one-time task.
3. Configure mu4e views; set up your mu4e to display the RSS folder however you like.

That’s it. Now I have RSS feeds, newsletters, Reddit posts, YouTube notifications, and everything else that supports RSS/Atom in one searchable, taggable, forwardable interface. I can process items as emails, convert them to other formats, or integrate them into my note-taking workflow seamlessly.

The whole thing just feels so natural - email is already a universal inbox, so why not make it truly universal?

Might be related: Where to get news?