RSS->IMAP Server

RSS->IMAP Server is an IMAP server that reads RSS feeds, displaying the items from the feeds as emails.

It is useful for adding RSS reading capability to older email clients that do support RSS natively (such as Outlook 2003) without resorting to plugins or mods that can affect the way the client operates. The system gives you a different IMAP folder for each feed. You can have multiple users with different feeds, the feeds you get is determined by your IMAP login.

Its written in java so should work on all supported platforms. Requires Java > 5.0 if you want to compile the source.

Configuration

All you need to do is create a <username>.txt file with your feeds in the working directory. The password can be anything, the server doesn’t care.

For example:

Blah.txt

A List Apart,http://www.alistapart.com/rss.xml
Slashdot,http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot/
Richard Johnson,http://www.rjohnson.id.au/wordpress/?feed=rss2

When setting up your email client, you probably need to know the following:

Server: localhost
Port: 143
Username: the name of the config file, eg the username "blah" uses the config file "blah.txt"
Password: anything
SMTP: as normal

Usage

Daemon

You may want to run it as a daemon (or a service on windows), in which case I would recommend using a tool like the Tanuki Java Service Wrapper. Here are some instructions to get it working with the wrapper:

To use, simply download the latest binary release and extract all the files. You can move this directory to somewhere suitable on your computer (I use Program Files\RssImapServer).
Download the RSS->IMAP Server bin package and place the .jar files in the lib directory.
Use this configuration file, replacing the one in the config directory.

Your login config files (where you specifiy what rss feeds you want) should be placed in the bin directory.

You should test the server before registering it by double-clicking on TestWrapper.bat

You can then register the server (InstallTestWrapper-NT.bat) and start it (StartTestWrapper-NT.bat). You should be able to modify the service start-up options through services under administrative tools in the control panel.

To uninstall, run UninstallTestWrapper-NT.bat and then delete the folder.

Console

Just download the Jar files and you should be able to run the server like this:

java -cp rssImapServer.jar;dateParser.jar rssImapServer/Server

Download

Known Bugs

Supports a very minimal feature set.
Only tested on Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Outlook 2003. (Older versions of outlook have a rather crippled IMAP implementation, please use a recent version).
Has problems with some RSS Feeds

To Do

Internationalisation
RSS Message themes!
Test more thoroughly
Add more client support

Feedback, bug fixes, questions or comments:

Please use the Sourceforge forum...