mail2rss

Zero cost method for converting newsletter to RSS:

• Cloudflare Workers
• testmail.app

Cloudflare Workers allows for 100,000 free requests per day.

testmail.app's free tier enables you to receive 100 emails per month and the email are saved for one day.

If you are a student then you can apply for GitHub Student Developer Pack and for free get the testmail essential tier which allows you to receive 10,000 emails per month instead.

Quick Start

1. Sign up for Cloudflare and testmail.app and activate them both.
2. Setting up testmail.app
3. Deploying to Cloudflare Workers
4. Setting up RSS reader

Setting up testmail.app

1. Navigate to https://testmail.app/console to get the <testmail-namespace> and <testmail-api-key>.
2. Keep the browser tab and the values are required for <#deploying-to-cloudflare-workers>

Remarks: General

testmail provides a rich API for getting emails, including filtering tags, matching tag prefixes, limiting counts, and support for GraphQL queries.

The official documentation is here: https://testmail.app/docs/

Remarks: Example

Suppose the namespace is diyyy，One can construct such an email address like diyyy.{tag}@inbox.testmail.app where {tag} can be replaced by anything.

For example，one can use diyyy.quartz@inbox.testmail.app to subscribe to Quartz's newsletter，or use diyyy.stefanjudis@inbox.testmail.app to subscribe to Stefan's web dev journey.

Deploying to Cloudflare Workers

1. Create a new worker, if one hasn't been yet created and deploy the default Hello World.
2. Setup Cloudflare environment variables by creating two new Text variables named

   TESTMAIL_NAMESPACE : <testmail-namespace>
   TESTMAIL_API_KEY : <testmail-api-key>
   

   and use the testmail credentials.
3. Edit the code in the online editor and replace it with mail2rss.js and deploy.

Setting up RSS reader

1. Navigate in a browser to

   https://<name-of-worker>.<cloudflare-username>.workers.dev/
   

2. Add a specific tag e.g. <my-cool-tag>.
3. Copy the generated email for the newsletter e.g.

   <testmail-namespace>.<my-cool-tag>@inbox.testmail.app
   

4. Copy the generated subscribe address into a RSS feed reader app e.g.

   https://<name-of-worker>.<cloudflare-username>.workers.dev/<my-cool-tag>
   

Remarks

Subscribing to https://<name-of-worker>.<cloudflare-username>.workers.dev/ will result in an empty feed as no tag is defined.

Debugging Tools

These tools can help with debugging:

• Cloudflare's online code editor: within the editor one can create a request directly to https://<name-of-worker>.<cloudflare-username>.workers.dev/{tag} and debug using the integrated Developer's Tools
• https://www.rssboard.org/rss-validator/check.cgi: to check the validity of the generated RSS feed
• https://html.onlineviewer.net/: to view the HTML of the newsletter

Mandarin documentation here

Contributors

• barefootstache
• Artin (original author)