For almost two weeks now I am using rss2email. It is a really nice script, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t cover all my needs.
Let me do it slowly, one step at a time.
First of all, I did a couple of changes to the code, right after installation. By default rss2email is called via another script – r2e, which specifies the default file for RSS URLs. Good functionality right there! I changed it so that I could have different feeds with different update intervals. I set up my cron to fetch some feeds every 15 minutes, other feeds every 30 minutes, and the rest of them every 60 minutes.
(NOTE: The recommended fetching interval is 60 minutes. Fetching more often can get you banned by administrators of the server. Use smaller intervals only when you are completely sure that that’s OK. Like with your own servers.)
Another change I did was to fix a somewhat annoying bug with Cyrillic in subject lines. Basically, all I had to do was to remove the call to header7bit() function.
And yet another thing I changed was an X-Feed-URL header. I added it so that I could easily sort emails into different folders.
Those all were minor changes that really improved my experience with rss2email. I really like how it works now.
But, as I said, it doesn’t cover all my needs. rss2email is good for those feeds that provide full content (not headers, or summaries), and that don’t use that many links or images in the articles. These appear as nice emails and can be read on- and off-line. Forums are much better read in email client than on the web or any other RSS aggregator, I discovered. Sorting by subject (thread) and date can re-create forum threads, after they get separated in RSS feed.
Feeds with lots of links, just headers, or with images should be handled differently. And I’ll be looking for a tool to solve that part.