Development Seed Blog

FeedAPI Mail Plugin Lets You Aggregate Your Email With Your News Feeds

Keeping up with all the information we get every day is no easy job. We follow hundreds of websites using feed readers and get hundreds of emails every day. If that wasn't enough, there are new sites everyday producing their own streams of information, sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and probably someone is launching a new one as I'm writing this. We definitely need help to manage all this information, so we use tools like email filters, feed aggregators and readers, and tagging tools.

Just one of the tools mentioned above means one more piece of software or website to deal with. And that means that when we find some other tool that can mix what two tools do into just one, we have at least some hope that the next day we'll have some spare time to do the real work. That's what FeedAPI Mail does for FeedAPI in Drupal -  adds one more functionality to the mix. 

Now we have the first proof-of-concept module for a FeedAPI plugin that adds mailing lists into the equation. With this plugin, you can follow mailing lists and enjoy the same features available for the other content. It treats individual mailing lists as if they were web feeds, allowing the same features for incoming emails as for the rest of the content, including automatic tagging (and geotagging), reading the emails in a single news reader, easy sharing with your team, and so on. Here's a look at it running in our team news aggregator/analyzer Managing News:

This FeedAPI Mail module works together with Mailhandler and FeedAPI, which grabs the rest of the feeds and presents them in a single web interface. In addition it has also a specific mail reader UI that can display threads and authors, which puts single emails in context.

To get started we need a mail account and to set up a mail inbox with Mailhandler so emails are read and made into nodes. Next we need to add a 'Mailing list' and set it up with the mailing list email address so incoming emails can be classified as coming from different lists. Then we just need to subscribe our email address to the mailing list (which may take some manual steps to handle confirmation emails), and we're all set.

What's to Come with FeedAPI Mail

There are some other possibilities we are working on with this plugin. One is to set up 'virtual' mailing lists. One could grab all emails coming from team members, allowing users to just CC emails to the site so they are archived and available for the rest of the team. Now imagine all your mailing list subscriptions and team email discussions being forwarded to a simple email address, and then getting swallowed and digested by a news reader that also adds smart information to your emails. Click a tag and and get the latest news related to that tag along with all the mailing lists' content and your team's emails. Click a place on the map and get the same, but now it's related to a given location (automatically geo-tagged). Now click a person's name and get his posts, news about him, emails to mailing lists, and team emails. Add in some more modules and get a weekly digest of all content (feeds and emails) related to a given subject, or get an SMS message every time someone mentions your name on the web or in mailing list discussions.

This small module is is just a starting point for all these features. For some time we've been working on the tools to make this possible: FeedAPI, Messaging, Notifications, and SMS Framework. Now it's just a question of adding some glue and getting them all working together. One day I hope to be able to get all the information that matters to me nicely laid out on a single web page that I can check from everywhere. And if we have a say, this will be built on Drupal :-)