Get This Blog (Or Any Other RSS Feed) Via Email

Reader Robert Odell writes: How can I get your column via email?

Hey, great question, Robert. Unfortunately there's no newsletter or email option on the Yahoo! Tech blogs yet, but I thought there might be a way to get it done with our RSS feed.

If you're unfamiliar with RSS, it's a very convenient way to get updates from a lot of blogs or news updates in a convenient, central location. My Yahoo! is a good example: You can add any RSS feed to your My Yahoo! page and watch new updates whenever you refresh the page. There are plenty of other online and offline RSS readers as well. Google Reader and Bloglines are two popular alternatives.

But we're talking about email, plain and simple. And it turns out that yes, there's at least one way to have an RSS feed delivered to you via email. It's surprisingly simple, in fact.

First, visit RSSFwd a free website. You won't see a lot of flash, just a field to "Enter a feed URL to subscribe." You need the URL of an RSS feed. For this blog, that URL is "http://d.yimg.com/tech.yahoo.com/rss/null". Just cut and paste it, without the quotes, into that field and hit submit. You'll be asked for an email address, so provide the one where you'd like the emails to be sent. (You will have to confirm this email address to prevent spamming, so check your inbox.)

After that, you're done. When I post a new blog entry, you'll find an entry in your inbox that looks like this:

ePrint makes offline file conversions easy.
Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:36:04 -0800
----------------------------------------
Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/15109/easy-offline-file-conversion-when-web-tools-wont-work

Unsubscription options will follow, so you can opt out of any feeds you set up, at any time.

Posts don't arrive in real time, because RSSFwd only checks about once every two hours for new posts. Also, unfortunately you will only get the information the RSS feed contains, and Yahoo! syndicates only the titles of each blog post along with a link to the source, so there's no way to get the full text of the column via email. Instead, you'll have to click that "source" link in the email to get to the full post, but hopefully this will ease  the burden of manually refreshing my blog page in order to see if I've written something new recently. Have fun with it!

Also: If you're a Yahoo! Mail user, Gina has instructions on how to use it as an RSS reader. Check it out.