19 Oct 2007 by Chris     2 Comments    Posted under: Gadgetry and IT

How to convert email to RSS for your phone

I came up with a neat workaround this week which might interest those of you who like to get news on your mobile phones, or would like to if it was easier. There’s no chance this is an original idea, but I was pleased with myself, nevertheless.

Many new phones (such as my recently-acquired Sony Ericsson W880i) have a neat RSS reader which is a great way of getting information on a cellphone. Despite manufacturers’ claims, web access on mobiles is clunky, so if it’s a chore checking the same website regularly for information on a PC, it’s so fiddly to be out of the question on a mobile. Email alerts are OK, but unless you’re a Crackberry user whose entire email life runs on your mobile, you’ll probably not want to scroll through loads of emails just to find out something from a particular news source. Finally, there are text alerts, but these are just horrible – they’re limited, often expensive, and come in when the sender decides, rather than when you want to read them.

The way forward then is to have simple access to various RSS news feeds, and mobiles like the W880i make this really slick. A couple of keypad clicks and I can read the latest BBC news feed, or BBC football feed, or anything really. But what about news sources which don’t come as RSS feeds? I’m in several email-only discussion groups, for example, which I’d love to have laid out neatly in RSS style. I also receive several email newsletters which again, I’d like to read at leisure on my mobile without having to access my email.

Here’s the beautifully elegant solution. Create a free blog at somewhere like Blogger – one which allows you to post to the blog by email. This will automatically create an RSS feed. Then anything you email to that blog will appear in the RSS feed. So if you’re in an email discussion group, add the blog posting address as a member of the group. If you want an email newsletter to be included in the feed, just subscribe to the newsletter with the blog posting address. If any of that proves difficult, you can, alternatively, set up a mail rule in your PC email program to just forward the relevant emails to the blog. That would introduce a delay, but that might not be critical for you.

Perhaps the neatest aspect of this is that you can combine several information sources or discussion groups into one feed.

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