Move Newsletters from Email to RSS Using DodgeIt.com

Email is not the most appropriate medium for newsletters. They clog up my inbox making it harder to find important messages, are too hard to scan, are impossible to link to, and should be set aside for an appropriate time during the day or week when they can get the attention they deserve.

One service - DodgeIt.com - has come up with a slick way to convert emails into RSS feeds, thus cleaning up your inbox and finding a better home for newsletters you want to read when the time is right.

Rather than using your work or personal email to subscribe to newsletters, you set up a new email address with DodgeIt specifically for newsletters you'd rather receive by email. You then subscribe to the RSS feed for the newsletter. Here is an example from a DodgeIt RSS feed I set up and now subscribe to through Bloglines.

My DodgeIt address is edkohler@dodgeit.com. If you publish a newsletter that has information relevant to what I write on this blog, feel free to subscribe me to it using that email address. Your newsletter will now publish to my RSS feed.

Another way to use this is to set up a separate email address for each newsletter you subscribe to. For example, I could subscribe to Andy Marken's newsletter using the address edkohler.marken@dodgeit.com then subscribe to that feed. If Marken sold his address list sometime down the road, I'd be able to easily tell because I'd start receiving additional emails to the dedicated email address.

I love dodgeit. I've been using it since I saw it on the ScreenSavers some years ago. But it has some downsides, for example imagine if one coded up a nice little script that scans random mailboxes(similar to a dictionary attack?), searches the page for certain keywords such as: PayPal, Password Change, etc., and then logs the links to those mailboxes in a text or html file for later exploration. I'm sure by crawling through a ton of these things you could get alot of info from careless people.

Comments

1. Posted by: Josh Bancroft on October 24, 2006 3:51 PM:

Cool. Sounds like a good way to get email subscriptions into Google Reader (Bloglines already has this functionality built in - you can create as many email subscriptions as you like, and they will show up as feed subscriptions.

I'm working on a big Bloglines/Google Reader comparison post, which I hope to post soon, and this is one of the main differences between the two services.

Required fields marked with: *
Name*:

Email Address*:

URL:
Remember personal info?

Comments*:

HTML Tags you can use in your posts:
<b>Bold</b> = Bold
<i>Italicized</i> = Italicized
<a href="http://www.othersite.com">Link to Other Site</a> = Link to Other Site

Please keep comments on-topic. Contact authors or other commenters
directly for off-topic conversations.

Notify me of future comments via e-mail

Technology Evangelist Digest - Free Newsletter

Sign up for the free Technology Evangelist Digest to receive daily updates, editorials, and practical advice on emerging technology trends in hardware, software, webware, marketing and beyond.

Technology Evangelist Digest will keep you up to date on the technology trends that will help make you more productive and efficient both in business and your personal life.

Let's face it: If you made it to this line, you must have found something valuable on this page, right? Think about how cool it would be to have something free and interesting to read every day from Technology Evangelist by signing up today.

1. Fill in your email below,
2. Then click on the confirmation email you receive.
3. That's it. Your first Technology Evangelist Digest will arrive within 24 hours.