(Originally from a comment that I made to this Makezine post)
If you’re looking to read your mailing lists in your newsreader, I’d recommend looking no further then Gmail. Gmail has a hidden feature: Atom feeds for Labels! The technique is simple:
- Setup a filter to catch all email from a specific mailing list.
- Apply a label to all of that mail (e.g. ‘list’).
- Access the Atom feed via this URL: https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/list/ (changing ‘list’ to be the name of the label.
It really is that simple – and there’s no need to create extra Gmail accounts, setup fake Blogger accounts, or anything silly like that.
Brendyn (August 6, 2005 at 7:49 pm)
How does it solve the problem of authentication?
John Resig (August 6, 2005 at 9:19 pm)
Do you mean in the sense that no one else can read that list? In order to read any Gmail Atom feed you must, first, be authenticated with their service – If I remember correctly it’s some form of basic authorization. For example, log out of Gmail, then try going to:
https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/list/
It won’t let you without authenticating first. Now, all major web-based blog readers support authentication – and I assume a majority of the desktop readers do too. It seems like a practical means to an end to me!
… Unless, of course, you wanted other people to read that feed – and you didn’t want to have to give out your password. I assume that you would then have to whip up some sort of proxy to move the feed from it’s authenticated source to a publically-available version.
iThink (August 9, 2005 at 9:11 am)
You may have the Gmail Atom Feed wrapped with feedburner,use this:
https://username:[email protected]/gmail/feed/atom/Label Name
feed becomes:http://feed.feedburner.com/yourpublicfeed
thus only feedburner knows the username and password.
Ben (December 13, 2005 at 12:37 pm)
I think *google’s* RSS reader either doesn’t support HTTPS or doesn’t support authentication. Either that, or I am inept and bad at the internet. Nur.