Subject: [Tools-discuss] Email to RSS

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 16:33:41 -0400

Hey all,

In response to a thread on another list where Henrik challenged me to
write a tool that pulls IETF lists over to RSS, here's a first cut:
<http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/feeds/gmail2rss.pl>

It's a perl script that does the following:
1. Read messages from a POP3 mailbox (set to use Gmail, but can use others)
2. Find any recipients [email-masked] or [email-masked]
3. Writes the message as a new item to feeds/${foo}.rss
   (creating the feed if necessary)

The feeds it creates work in Safari and Google Reader, but not in
Thunderbird for some reason.  A bug to fix.  I ran it on an IETF sink
account I've got, and posted sample feeds in this directory:
<http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/feeds/>

I'm not sure what the best way to integrate this will the tools
infrastructure is.  E.g., one could set up an account for it,
auto-subscribe it to IETF lists, and run the script it as a cron job.

Is anyone interested in this?  I'm by no means an expert in either
email or RSS or the tools system, so help would be appreciated.

--Richard

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 13:48:25 -0700

>email or RSS or the tools system, so help would be appreciated.

Count me as interested and willing to help devlop.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:21:42 +0200

> email or RSS or the tools system, so help would be appreciated.

Comments from others would be very good, but for the particular part
of the problem which relates to integration with tools, what I'd like
would really be to have a standalone script to which I could pipe one
message, and it could be set to either grab the feed name from the To:
header or from a command-line option, and would update the right feed
with the email content.

Being able to process one mail at a time from stdin (i.e., from a pipe)
is the most crucial part for easy integration.

Best,

	Henrik

---

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:31:12 -0700

>email or RSS or the tools system, so help would be appreciated.

Take a look at draft-dusseault-httpmail-00

Regards,
-sm

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 16:34:36 -0700

>is the most crucial part for easy integration.

This should not be a problem. We'll work on this in the coming weeks.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 20:20:19 -0400

The goal of this effort is a little different than what Lisa's draft
is getting at.  The point of translating mail lists to RSS is to avoid
complicated filtering schemes: Since all RSS readers that I know of
are capable of separating out sources, if you make each list a source,
you avoid having to sort them yourself.

--Richard

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 20:21:17 -0400

Seconded.  That actually simplifies the script quite a bit (don't have
to do POP or iterate through messages).

--Richard

---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 16:02:59 +0200

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 04:33:41PM -0400,
 Richard Barnes <[email-masked]> wrote 

> <http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/feeds/gmail2rss.pl>

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, [email-masked] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to
use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

>    (creating the feed if necessary)

Why using the underspecified RSS (which one, by the way?) and not IETF
format, RFC 4287? Besides, reading IETF mailing lists without
threading would be quite painful, so I suggest to the brave coders to
add RFC 4685 support as well.

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:17:50 -0400

I was going to take a peek at the script as well and got the same error
message.

One of the reasons I was going to look was to see if it was generating
Atom and, if not, how easy it would be to convert to generating Atom.

	Tony Hansen
	[email-masked]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Tools-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 10:25:34 -0400

Sorry, forgot that apache would try to run the scripts.  You can find
an updated version (conforming to Henrik's request that it take one
message at a time from STDIN) at this URI:
<http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/feeds/mail2rss.tar.gz>

Also, you can see a bunch of sample feeds if you look at the directory
one level up:
<http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/feeds/>

I've set up a little SVN repository for this stuff.  Let me know if
you want to contribute and I can send you a link and credentials.

--Richard

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 10:33:00 -0400

> format, RFC 4287?

The short answer is that XML::RSS was the first Perl module I found.
I'll look around and see if there's a similarly easy way to do Atom.

> Besides, reading IETF mailing lists without

That could be more subtle (right now, we don't look at the existing
contents of the feed, we just append), but I'll also check to see how
hard it would be to implement, e.g., whether there's a library to use.

--Richard

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:02:06 -0600

Cool.

I have a gmail account that has been subscribed to most of the IETF  
lists for a few years if you want to use it for testing. It's not used  
for anything else - I just use it so I can you gmail to search  
archives of lists.

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 09:11:32 -0700

>add RFC 4685 support as well.

I will make sure it is Atom.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 12:48:49 -0400

Ok, Atom now supported, including an initial stab at RFC 4658.  SVN
directory for the whole thing is here:
<http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/svn2/mail2rss/>

--Richard