Why You Should Be Using RSS - the addendum

One of my earliest blog posts dealt with Why You Should Be Using RSS to greatly improve your online experience. In that post, I provided the basics of setting up and organizing your RSS reader, as well as 3 "advanced" steps for dealing with situations where an RSS feed is not available.

The trickiest of those situations was mailing lists and items usually sent to email (like LinkedIn discussions and YahooGroups messages). I outlined a method where you could have those messages sent to a blogger.com email address, which would post the messages to a blog and you could subscribe to it in your reader.

Then, a few weeks ago, one of the admins from one of the groups threw a hissy-fit, when he didn't understand what I was doing (and, rather than working with me to find a solution to the problem, he opted to ban me, causing all sorts of difficulties with getting reinstated (and, then, he decided to insult me repeatedly for his unwise, hasty actions - class act he was!)). You can read that whole debacle here.

Nevertheless, I persevered, and have FINALLY found a method by which you can capture those messages withouth having to use your email service - and, it's easier than my initial recommendation!

So, here's the new and improved - how to get email messages (like newsletters) into your RSS reader.

Step 1 - sign up for an email address at www.gmx.com -- other sites may work, as well, but this is the one I tested and worked with.

Step 2- send the emails/newletters you want to read in your RSS reader to that address (change each of your yahoo groups settings, etc.)

Step 3 - head over to www.xfruits.com and access the "mail-to-RSS" brick. You'll need to enter your user name (which is the full email address: xxxxx@gmx.com) and your password, and you'll need to enter the server information (pop.gmx.com). Then, click on the finished box and you should be prompted to subscribe to the feed in your reader (Google Reader, if you've followed what I've prescribed, all along).

And, that's it. The only *bug* I've found, so far, is that it seems to access the mailbox repeatedly and sends the same messages (although, that may have already worked itself out). In the end, that's a tiny speedbump in the grand scheme of things...

This step, along with the others I've suggested, will greatly speed up your ability to scour and read what's new and happening on the Web, in record time....