Feed2Maildir

Read RSS/Atom feeds in your favourite, maildir-compatible email client.

Requirements

• Python 3.2+
• feedparser
• python-dateutil

Usage

Just run feed2maildir, which should be placed in your $PATH by setup.py. You will need a JSON configuration file at $HOME/.f2mrc that looks like this:

{
    "db": "~/.f2mdb",
    "maildir": "~/mail/feeds",
    "feeds": {
        "Coding Horror": "http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror/",
        "Commit Strip": "http://www.commitstrip.com/en/feed/",
        "XKCD": "http://xkcd.com/rss.xml",
        "What If?": "http://what-if.xkcd.com/feed.atom",
        "Dilbert": "http://feed.dilbert.com/dilbert/daily_strip?format=xml",
        "BSDNow": "http://feeds.feedburner.com/BsdNowOgg"
    }
}

Note that the last element in a dict must not be followed by a comma, because Python's json.loads() says so.

There are a bunch of command-line arguments to overwrite the config file:

optional arguments:
    -h, --help  show this help message and exit
    -c <file>   override the config file location (~/.f2mrc)
    -d <file>   override the database file location (~/.f2mdb)
    -m <dir>    override the maildir location (None)
    -s          strip HTML from the feeds
    -S <prog>   strip HTML from the feeds using an external program
    -l          just write the links without the update

To check for updates regularly, just toss it into cron to run once every hour or so.

Strip HTML

feed2maildir can strip the HTML tags from the feed using a built-in HTML stripper (option -s) or using an external program (option -S <prog>)

In this last case, the program must read the HTML from it standard input and return it stripped via the standard output.

The <prog> can be the name of a program or it can be a full shell command. In that case don't forget to quote the full command.

Here is an example of using pandoc to convert HTML to Markdown

feed2maildir -S 'pandoc --from html --to markdown_strict'