Receive Feeds Via Email

Many dynamic webpages now have RSS enabled. When you come across such a page in Safari, an RSS icon appears at the right-hand end of the address bar. You can click on the icon and view the RSS output directly in the browser; then you can bookmark it and have the feed automatically checked for updates etc.

You can also take the address of the feed and paste it into a separate RSS aggregator application.

What make RSS FWD different is that with it you can have their service keep track of the feed, and email you a digest of the updates. The email includes the full text of the feed item along with images, if that's what the feed author intended. Included in the email message is a link to the page, a link to un-subscribe from that particular feed, and a link for managing all your feeds.

Once you're set up to receive feed emails you can go to a page on the RSS FWD and drag off a bookmarklet and drop it on your Bookmarks Bar. Now you can simply click the bookmarklet button when you're on an RSS enabled page that you'd like to track, and you'll be taken to an RSS FWD page where a sample of the feed is shown for your confirmation—click to approve it and you're now subscribed.

I like this service because it's free, it's reliable and faultless in operation, and finally because it makes the management of RSS feeds into part of something that I already regularly do—namely, check my email.