From email to blog - a painful discovery

What a day! Can you believe that - as the first decade of the 21st century works it way to close (less than 18 months, unless you buy into the 2001-side of the start of the millennium debate) - there are still major government organisations that don't provide an RSS feed of their media releases and site updates? To get this info, you still have to sign-up to the old email newsletter. Now, I have always maintained that a good KM system/tool can be as simple as an email account, but I want a way to keep that email account uncluttered. I also want to be able to clip and blog things I think might be of interest to people, without having to create my own stupid email list.

So today was all about answering the question: How do I turn an email alert into an RSS feed from the user end? It took me about 4 hours to come up with the answer (yes - there is one).

For this answer, I must stand on the shoulders of giants. My thinking was guided by this blog post on the subject. The solution didn't work for me, but it got me thinking in the right direction.

Now, the process for me is convoluted, but works. It involved the following steps:

1. Create a new Google account



2. Create a new Gmail account



• This probably isn't necessary if you want to use an existing account to receive your alerts, but since you've got to create a new Google account and a Blogger blog, you might as well manage it all from the same place
  



3. Subscribe to the alerts you receive using your GMail address



4. Create a Blogger account



5. Enable your Blog to accept posts via email automatically



6. Create a Gmail filter for each alert you have subscribed to



• You can create an autoforward of all emails in one step, but I have this notion of creating multiple alerts in different blogs, so I want to keep the ability to differentiate where emails are forwarded to



7. In each filter, specify that you want to forward these emails to the email address created by your Blogger account

Voila! Your new blog now posts automatically every email you receive as part of the alert. You can then subscribe to this feed, pass it around, etc.

Those of you familiar with copyright law are probably wondering if we aren't entering into some dangerous water here in regards to republishing content on a third party site, and you are quite right. I have made the feed undiscoverable, however, so it can only be found by people I give the feed to, which salves my conscience a little. I'm also attributing the material back to it's source, and most of the emails are identical to a blog post anyway, since they pretty much all redirect back to the parent site. Still, if the AG comes knocking on my door asking me to not do this anymore, I suppose I will have to comply, and go back to forwarding his emails to other interested parties in an uncontrolled manner.