RSS feeds as emails using Notmuch and rss2email

I’m all-in with Emacs after once again failing to get along with Obsidian.

I’d stopped using Notmuch in Emacs for email, but I brought it back after re-reading Paul Ford’s article in Wired: I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana.

Could I too start storing things as email and find them later using Notmuch?

So far, I’ve solved RSS feeds. Rather than reading feeds in NetNewsWire or Elfeed, I’m using rss2email to convert RSS feeds to emails and reading them in Notmuch.

A good reference for getting started with rss2email is LinuxBabe’s How to Install and Use rss2email on Ubuntu

The tricky part of rss2email is actually sending the emails. I eventually got things working using msmtp, which would have been fine, but it’s a lot of extra hoohah. If only I could save the RSS items directly into Notmuch. Guess what, I can!

rss2email supports writing to Maildir files. It was as easy as adding the following to my rss2email config:

memail-protocol = maildir
maildir-path = ~/Mail/Baty.net
maildir-mailbox = Feeds

rss2email supports importing OPML files, but I decided to clean things up and add feeds one at a time, like this:

r2e add BatyBlog https://baty.blog/feed.rss

Then, when I want to read my feeds I run r2e run and everything ends up right in Notmuch. I don’t want them tagged with “inbox” along with my real email, so I added a filter to the post-new hook in Notmuch.

notmuch tag +feed -inbox -- '(from:jack+rss@baty.net)'

I have the rss2email sender configured as jack+rss@baty.net so it’s easy to filter just those messages. With that hook, new RSS feed items do not appear in the inbox, but I can easily read them in Notmuch by searching for tag:feed AND tag:unread.

So there, I’ve moved my RSS feeds into emails and manage them via Notmuch.