Monday, June 28

GMail, RSS Feeds - part 2

Well, attentive readers of this blog will doubtless recall that I fumbled around a bit with a friend trying to find a way to do Gmail notifications without using another application like GTray.

I was particularly taken up with the idea of using RSS as a way to do new mail notifications. Well, a bit of searching, and I found Gmail file backup, a PHP script which allows use of Gmail as a filestore. One thing led to another, so I wrote a modification to that script (download it here).

What does it do? Well, fill in the two variables that are required (your gmail user name and password), run it on a protected web server (don't expose it to the outside world!) and it will automatically login to your gmail account, check mail and generate a RSS feed of mailbox statistics. Right now, it just has total inbox mails, unread mails and mailbox utilization (out of 1000mb, usage %). I use it with Sage, my feedreader of choice, and it seems to do the job reasonably well.

At the moment, it's a bit redundant for me, since I keep a Firefox tab open on Gmail all the time anyway :) But it should be a bit more useful when I get some time to hack together a channel of conversations which contain unread mail. (ie: conversation XYZ has 1 unread mail, conversation ABC has 3 unread mail and so on).
Update: download 0.2 here. There is some support for conversations, ie: you can see who sent the unread mail. Let me know if you try this one out. I'd be particularly interested in knowing how conformant my RSS/RDF output is..

would be a good idea to read the (lengthy!) disclaimer notice and instructions top of the file, if you do download this and try it out

Update 27th August: 0.3 has been kicked out to the wild. Grab it here

|

<< Home