DRE - An RSS-to-Email Aggregator

DRE is a Perl script that fetches articles from a list of RSS feeds and sends them on as plain-text emails.

Configuration

Feed URLs go in ~/.dre/feeds - one URL per line, blank lines are OK, lines beginning with a hash (#) are ignored as comments.

The recipient of the emails goes in ~/.dre/recipient - single line, plain email address, e.g. dave@biff.org.uk

Command-line options

Just run the script: dre

-d - print chatty debug information
-q - be quiet (don't complain about bad feeds) - for use with cron
-n - don't send any email (for repopulating the "seen" file)
-a - send email for all entries, even those previously seen
-f - download (to ~/.dre/downloads) an mp3 file listed as an enclosure
-h - show brief help text

Download

Download the current version. The licence is GPL.

Required Perl modules: XML::RSS, HTML::Entities, LWP::UserAgent, LWP::Simple, DB_File, HTML::FormatText::WithLinks, Data::Dumper, Getopt::Std.

History

11th April 2005: 15th June 2005: 31st August 2005: 23rd September 2005: 11th November 2005: 6th July 2006: 4th August 2006: 23rd March 2007: The name sort-of stands for "Dave's RSS to Email convertor".

Troubleshooting / Q&A

DRE keeps sending me the same feed entries over and over again.
Maybe you upgraded your DB library, e.g. by upgrading Debian Woody to Sarge, and the "seen" file can't be read or updated:
dave@eyas:~/.dre$ file seen*
seen:     Berkeley DB (Hash, version 8, native byte-order)
seen.old: Berkeley DB (Hash, version 5, native byte-order)
Fix: delete the "seen" file and run "dre -n" to repopulate the "seen" file.
DRE doesn't understand Atom feeds.
I know... it's on my to-do list so I can read Google Blog.

Dave Holland <dave@biff.org.uk>
$Id: dre.html,v 1.13 2007-03-23 13:24:08 dave Exp $