MailBucket Wins
James Farmer was writing about RSS Feed Comparisons and commented that he didn’t see how you could get Google alerts to RSS. I had been meaning to experiment with this and finally found a moment to do so.
If you want to use a news alert service, such as those offered by Google or Yahoo!, you might be tempted to see if there’s a way to get the alert into your RSS aggregator. In testing this out with a couple of mail to RSS services, MailBucket and DodgeIt, MailBucket wins for usefulness. However, I’m not sure this is something I would seriously use. For instance, when you receive an alert, it’s a single email containing potentially several stories. If you use DodgeIt, you don’t have a chance to peek inside the email; instead, you have to click the item and open the “email” using your browser. If you use Mailbucket, you get the full text of the email in your aggregator. This is nice, but I’d certainly prefer to see each headline as an individual item in my aggregator, which would mean that Google would have to send out but one headline per email.
Another pitfall of MailBucket is that it only returns 10 items (see the XML for the EdTech discussion list). If you want to track a high-volume list this is not good.
On the positive side, MailBucket produces an HTML version, too (see my EdTech discussion list example). And, there’s protection from SpamAssassin as well as a “mark as spam” tool at the bottom of each message.
These two tools might be useful for some other purpose. I think the next time I’m worried a vendor or site might sell my email address, I’ll use a DodgeIt address and add it to my aggregator just in case they have some real business with me. If they don’t, I’ll just delete the feed.
