Instant Email?

dudemasicus · 08/23/2004, 05:51 PM

For those that are using Microsoft Exchange and want their emails and the blogs that they follow "pushed" to their Treos, I stumbled on a combination that works great:

1) Chatter IMAP client
2) News Gator

News Gator gathers information from various Blogs (you can customize this to hit any site you want) and places them into folders under your Inbox in Exchange. Exchange Server being IMAP compliant, syncs perfectly with Chatter. BAM! Email and Blogs delivered right to your Treo as they are received!

Of course, you have to leave your Outlook client running so that News Gator can do it's thing, but I pretty much never turn it off anyway, so it has not been an issue.

Just a little tip I stumbled on today... needed to share with someone - and my wife gave me that "what? and why do I care?" stare...

Chatter · 08/23/2004, 06:51 PM

I love it!!

atmasphere · 08/24/2004, 09:39 PM

That's very cool! Here's another way after reading this I just recalled...

Sign up for a free account with Info Aggregator - http://rss.blogstreet.com

It's an IMAP email acount for reading RSS Feeds. It's been a while since I used it and I have not actually checked to make sure that Chatter works completely there, but in theory it should be all good. It's free and does not require a computer to be on redirecting or filtering for you.

UPDATE
OK - Just checked and it totally works!! Not sure how much I'll use this but it's cool to know that I can create a small OPML file of more critical or interesting blogs/feeds to read and have them pop in on the Treo.

dudemasicus · 08/24/2004, 11:26 PM

VERY cool! Thanks for the tip!

dtoombs · 08/25/2004, 12:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by atmasphere

That's very cool! Here's another way after reading this I just recalled...

Sign up for a free account with Info Aggregator - http://rss.blogstreet.com

It's an IMAP email acount for reading RSS Feeds. It's been a while since I used it and I have not actually checked to make sure that Chatter works completely there, but in theory it should be all good. It's free and does not require a computer to be on redirecting or filtering for you.

UPDATE
OK - Just checked and it totally works!! Not sure how much I'll use this but it's cool to know that I can create a small OPML file of more critical or interesting blogs/feeds to read and have them pop in on the Treo.

Is this really working well for you? I went to rss.blogstreet.com last night and put in about 20 feeds I wanted to watch (news.com, CNN, etc.). So far, I've only received only 15 messages on my Treo - and all of them (other than the administrative welcome message) were just from one feed.

And what's even stranger, is that when I built a new IMAP profile for my desktop mail client to access my box - I only get one message ... the "welcome" message. So, I don't know what's going on with my implementation - but from my point of view, this doesn't seem to work at all?

atmasphere · 08/25/2004, 12:22 PM

It is working... Just takes a while to kick in. Once it does though the feeds are pulling through no problem. This am I had quite a few to read and I've noticed that it is pushing them through and that QSYNC works great.

This is perhaps slower or less timely only based on how blogstreet / info aggregator polls the feeds. It would be great if other services (like bloglines) offered something like this, but hey it's free...

I'm happy for now. The other RSS readers I've tried all had to connect or sync (Hand / RSS and mNews) this is simple and uses much less memory and seems to be quicker for getting the info. The only hitch I can really see is that you can't manually check a feed... but we are on a handheld afterall.

dtoombs · 08/25/2004, 01:47 PM

Hmmm - interesting. Although I'm still not convinced that InfoAggregator is working correctly. Just took a look at my account, and out of the 21 feeds I have asked for, only 7 show a "last fetched" time ... and the times are all around 9:30pm last light when I was setting all of this up.

Am I entering the feeds improperly? Here's a few that work - but haven't updated on InfoAggregator since 9:30pm last night....

http://news.com.com/2547-1_3-0-5.xml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.rss

And here's a few that don't look like they've ever worked at all ... no "last fetched" time shown ....

http://www.winnetmag.com/Common/RSS/Windows.xml
http://www.wired.com/news/feeds/rss2/0,2610,24,00.xml

Just out of curiousity, I put a few of these into a RSS screensaver I was testing out, and they seem to work ok. So I'm assuming the problem has to be with InfoAggregator, or my use of their service? Very boggled.

Thanks much!

PS: Nice site.

atmasphere · 08/25/2004, 01:50 PM

Glad you like my site...

I think the issue is more of frequency on Info Aggregator than anything else... If you leave Chatter live or poll every 30 min and they only make hourly sweeps you won't be seeing much. At this point I know the system works, though it's definitely to be determined how well.

There are definitely better aggregators out there in my opinion. I like Bloglines for server based and NetNewsWire on Mac for client based. There just are not any that can do this Chatter trick through IMAP that I've discovered. Though... perhaps a more diligent search would be worthwhile.

atmasphere · 08/26/2004, 10:58 AM

Here's the answer on this one straight from Blogstreet"

Quote:

The frequency of polling varies depending on its popularity i.e. number
of people who have subscribed for a particular feed. We have a huge
number of people who have their specific sites added and they are the
only subscriber to such a site - in such cases, polling happens only
once. For most popular feeds, it happens five times a day at specific
hours.

Currently we do not support individual settings for polling of sites.

dtoombs · 08/26/2004, 11:47 AM

Yeah -- a whole mountain of data started pouring in late in the day yesterday, so it does seem to be working. Makes sense about how they handle determining the polling (based on popularity) though. Thanks for sharing that --- and for informing us about Info Aggregator!

atmasphere · 08/26/2004, 12:49 PM

I did some serious googling yesterday and here's the other options I've found to do this and their flaws...

IzyMail / IzyNews -- I was so pumped when I found this one, only to discover that the IMAP they provide is not supported by Chatter since the IDLE command is not there. Not sure what can be done, whether it's the type of server they have or what... have to try and reach support.

rss2email I just have not had a chance to play here... need to install some stuff server side then let it do the magic. This means you need a host or a connected computer at least in order to get it working. I think this might be the best shot, but has the lowest rank in my book on usability for a large audience based on the tech required.

That's it... I can't find any other existing way for RSS to come through to an IMAP account without leaving a machine running ala Newsgator, which only supports POP3 btw.

atmasphere · 08/27/2004, 01:30 AM

Had some time to play with this tonight and it's totally cool. You can set a cron job which is certainly more frequent than the polling done by Blogstreet's Info Aggregator.

I have it set to deliver text only emails and they are very nicely formatted considering the conversion that is going on. If you have a server you can run this on, you'll definitely want to give it a shot.

I set up a separate email account on my domain specifically to handle this so I already knew Chatter supported it for push. My cron runs every hour and I just QSYNC it to go on the Treo.

IzyNews · 08/27/2004, 05:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by atmasphere

IzyMail / IzyNews -- I was so pumped when I found this one, only to discover that the IMAP they provide is not supported by Chatter since the IDLE command is not there. Not sure what can be done, whether it's the type of server they have or what... have to try and reach support.

Thanks for the interest, but unfortunately, we are unable to support the IDLE extension at this time. It is being worked on, but no definitive date, yet.

There are a number of other IMAP clients for the Treo which work perfectly Ok with IzyNews. treocentral's home page features some of them ;-))

And while we are at it:
Some of distinguishing features of IzyNews are

IzyNews does not clutter the Inbox (like POP3 does)
All messages organize themselves into folders
Automatic message expiration, no need to delete anything

and, specifically for mobile users:

Synchronization across multiple devices
Text-only views included (ideal for mobile clients)

experiment626 · 08/27/2004, 10:02 AM

I am using http://www.newsinmotion.net for 5 feeds IMAP emailed 2x per day. Works great with Chatter. Free too.

Dunc · 08/27/2004, 11:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by atmasphere

It's an IMAP email acount for reading RSS Feeds. It's been a while since I used it and I have not actually checked to make sure that Chatter works completely there, but in theory it should be all good. It's free and does not require a computer to be on redirecting or filtering for you.

This sounds great, but I can't get Chatter to work with it. When I turn SSL off I keep getting a bad login error (yes, I've verified that the account info is correct - I can connect fine from my PC), and when I turn SSL on Chatter just sits there and never connects. I've never had problems with Chatter connecting to any other IMAP servers. Anyone got any thoughts?

Dunc

Dunc · 08/27/2004, 12:00 PM

My mistake - I was logging on with my screen account name and not userid@blogstreet.com as I should have been with Chatter. In typical fashion Chatter is now working flawlessly.

Dunc

atmasphere · 08/28/2004, 11:52 AM

I've looked into this now...much deeper

155 · 08/28/2004, 01:55 PM

So do you have any comments on how well these services work on our Treo's. I think most of us have the goal of using them on our Treo's since there are plenty of desktop aggregators.

atmasphere · 08/28/2004, 02:19 PM

Thought I had stated that in the post...

I feel Chatter and rss2email work best. That said, if you don't have access to your own server to run things, you might want to use Blogstreet's Info Aggregator which works very well as well with Chatter, but the updates are when they happen rather than in your control.

News inMotion is limited but works ... and IzyMail won't work at all with Chatter. I have not tried Izy with Mailwave, but I am sure it works well with SnapperMail. SM does not support push and you would have to buy the enterprise version in order to get IMAP to sync the folders Izy sets up.... based on feed or topic.

bananachunks · 01/25/2006, 06:41 PM

I'm liking the idea of rss2email, and it was a snap to install, but I'm guessing it doesn't do attachments... :/ I will try newsinmotion and Info Aggregator later - can't seem to pull them up from work right now (then again, this time of day, our network is sub-dialup speed)....

Thanks