rrss2imap

rrss2imap is a Rust reimplementation of the classical Python script rss2imap

Goals of this project include

• ✅ Having a reasonably performant implementation of rss2imap (by performant I mean able to run without problem on my Raspberry)
• ✅ Learn Rust
• ✅ Explore parallel mechanism (thanks Rayon)
• ✅ Maybe provide some kind of image embedding (DONE)

Getting Started

Download rrss2imap

rrss2imap can be downloaded from releases page. If there is no release for your platform, you can fill an issue ... or if you know Travis, you can even add your platform to .travis.yml.

As a user

Application transforming rss feeds into email by directly pushing the entries into IMP folders. This application is an adaption of the rss2imap Python script to Rust.

How to use ?

The simplest way to understand what to do is just to run rrss2imap --help

It should output something like

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    add       Adds a new feed given its url
    delete    Delete the given feed
    email     Changes email address used in feed file to be the given one
    export    Export subscriptions as opml file
    help      Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    import    import the given opml file into subscriptions
    list      List all feeds configured
    new       Creates a new feedfile with the given email address
    reset     Reset feedfile (in other words, remove everything)
    run       Run feed parsing and transformation

Which give you a glimpse of what will happen

Each of these commands also provide some help, when run with the same --help flag.

The important operations to memorize are obviously

rrss2imap new

Creates a new config.json file. At init time, the config file will only contains settings element with the email address set. You have to set

• the used imap server ** with user login and password ** and security settings (secure should contain {"Yes": secure port} for imap/s or {"No": unsecure port} for simple imap)
• the default config ** folder will be the full path to an imap folder where entries will fall in ** email will be the recipient email address (which may not be yours for easier filtering) ** Base64 image inlining
• feeds is the list of all rss feeds that can be added

rrss2imap add

This command will add a new feed to your config. You can directly set here the email recipient as well as the folder (but not the base64 image inlining parameter)

rrss2imap run

THis is the main command. It will

1. get all rss/atom feed contents
2. List all new entries in these feeds
3. Transform these entries into valid email messages
4. Push these mail messages directly on IMAP server

rrss2imap list

Displays a list of the rss feeds. Here is an example

0 : http://tontof.net/?rss (to: Nicolas Delsaux <nicolas.delsaux@gmx.fr> (default)) RSS/rrss2imap (default)
1 : https://www.brothers-brick.com/feed/ (to: Nicolas Delsaux <nicolas.delsaux@gmx.fr> (default)) RSS/rrss2imap (default)
2 : https://nicolas-delsaux.hd.free.fr/rss-bridge/?action=display&bridge=LesJoiesDuCode&format=AtomFormat (to: Nicolas Delsaux <nicolas.delsaux@gmx.fr> (default)) RSS/rrss2imap (default)

Please notice that each entry has an associated number, which is the one to enter when running rrss2imap delete <NUMBER>

config.json format

A typical feedfile will look like this

    {
      "settings": {
        "email": {
          "server": "the imap server of your mail provider",
          "user": "your imap user name",
          "password": "your imap user password",
          "secure": {
            "Yes": 993 // Set to "Yes": port for imaps or "No": port for unsecure imap
          }
        },
        // This config is to be used for all feeds
        "config": {
            // This is the email address written in each mail sent. It can be different from the email user
            "email": "Nicolas Delsaux <nicolas.delsaux@gmx.fr>",
            // This is the imap folder in which mails will be written
            "folder": "RSS/rrss2imap"
            // Setting this to true will force rrss2imap to transform all images into
            // base64. This prevents images from beind downloaded (and is really cool when reading feeds from a smartphone)
            // But largely increase each mail size (which can be quite bothering)
            "inline_image_as_data": true
        }
      },
      "feeds": [
        {
          "url": "http://tontof.net/?rss",
          // This last updated is updated for each entry and should be enough to have rss items correctly read
          "last_updated": "2019-05-04T16:53:15",
          "config": {
              // each config element can be overwritten at the feed level
          }
        },

As a developer

• clone this repository
• run cargo run

Prerequisites

You need a complete rust build chain

To perform a release, you'll also need

• cargo release
• git journal

Releasing

1. Install cargo release (cargo install cargo-release) and git-journal (cargo install git-journal)
2. Run cargo release. This will build a version of the code, push it onto crates/io and tag the repository. Thanks to GitHub Actions (and more specifically the on_tag.yml one), once the tag is pushed to GitHub, a release is created.
3. Publish the release. This will trigger the on_release_created.yml which will build executables for the target platforms and attach them to the release.

And release is done! It was easy, no?

Installing

1. Dowload latest version from Github releases page
2. Run rrss2imap new which will create the config.json
3. Fill the missing parts (typically include email configuration)
4. Run with rrss2imap run

Running the tests

Automated tests can be run with cargo test. Coverage is done thanks to tarpaulin. Coverage is also computed during pull requests runs

Built With

Take a look at Cargo dependencies

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

• Nicolas Delsaux - Initial work - Riduidel

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

• Rui Carmo for Python implementation of rss2imap
• Aaron Swartz for RSS (and rss2email)