RSS and E-mail

Wednesday, 24 September 2003

Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I’ve wondered the same thing myself. As far as I can tell;

Subscribing to an RSS feed is anonymous; no one can send you messages outside of the channels you’re subscribed to, and if one starts carrying content you don’t like, you can unsubscribe. With e-mail, once your address is out there, you can’t get it back.
RSS items are tightly bound to their channels; they come pre-categorised for your convenience. To categorise e-mail, you need to set up “rules,” “filters,” or “recipes.” This is annoying for the expert user, and nearly impossible for the novice. To me, this is actually the biggest difference.
RSS metadata is easily structured and extended, thanks to XML. E-mail headers aren’t so obviously so, although I don’t think this is a big issue, at least for now.
E-mail has a different distribution model; in most cases, mail is sent to designated intermediaries with one protocol (SMTP), while clients poll designated intermediaries using another protocol (IMAP or POP). The intermediaries provide some take responsibility for persisting and delivering the messages in e-mail. Meanwhile, most usage of RSS is over HTTP, and can therefore take advantage of HTTP’s facilities, like SSL, caching, authentication, Web indexing and so forth.

3 Comments

Bill Seitz said:

Re your #2 - I think as the number of channels you track goes up, you’ll want to start categorizing them! You may want to do some categorizing at the channel-level (“these guys are my a-list so I’ll browse all of them”) and some will be at the item-level (“from this b-list of channels show me all the items about Zope or Python”)

Thursday, October 2 2003 at 8:44 AM

Ulrich Schwanitz said:

Tight integration of RSS with eMail (without losing anonymity etc.) is accomplished in IzyNews:

http://izynews.com

IzyNews is a new way of receiving news and other RSS feeds in our eMail application. With IzyNews, you can subscribe to thousands of weblogs and professionally syndicated headlines feeds for delivery right into your eMail application.

Compressed information for speed-reading, no time-consuming surfing. Automatically delivered to your eMail, no pop-ups or virusses, and 100% spam-free. Guaranteed.

IzyNews is made to work with a broad variety of popular eMail applications, such as

Outlook Express, Outlook, Pocket PC Inbox, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Entourage, Mulberry and others

IzyNews is an online service and not yet another application. It leverages less commonly used features of your eMail and does not require a download or installation. It is compatible with any computer system.

IzyNews works across computer boundaries and gives you the same view, whether you are at home, at work or on the road. No more synchronizing the same items multiple times.

Monday, June 7 2004 at 10:39 AM

Adam Messinger said:

Check out www.feedmailr.com. It is a hosted RSS to IMAP gateway. This means you can read, search, and forward feed entries in exactly the same way you handle mail.

Monday, July 24 2006 at 2:56 AM

mark nottingham

RSS and E-mail

3 Comments

Bill Seitz said:

Ulrich Schwanitz said:

Adam Messinger said: