Feed-mail.com is an interesting, if quite unusable concept. It’s email sent via RSS feeds. You subscribe to your Feed-mail feed and you get emails that are sent to that feed. Less spam, more secure. But the sender has to login to his Feed-mail account in order to send a message. And there’s no SMTP service either so you’re locked into Feed-mail’s interface. And one thing that irked me was that my password was inscribed into the feed’s url in plain. Major security risk. And I reckon Feed-mail also has the same security problem as receiving Gmail via Bloglines or any public RSS aggregator — you have to ensure that your feed has privacy settings. Feed-mail is still in beta so things might improve on usability.
# Mike Buckbee on August 30th, 2005
Hey Tim, thanks for checking the FeedMail service out.
As you said, the service is in its first beta and still has quite a number of rough edges.
We’ve put the site out in it’s admittedly broken form to find out what people thought were the good and bad things about it.
You’ve highlighted one of the things we are changing for the next release, which is how the authentication of the RSS feeds are handled. More details about this are in the latest blog post.
We take security very seriously and even in the current beta, everything (including the password in the URL) is encrypted via SSL. SSL provides over the wire security (superior to even basic http-auth), but does not help you in the Bloglines or Gmail scenarios you described.
A small quibble, I’d describe the default behavior of Bloglines/Gmail marking feeds as public as a security issue with those services, not as something unique to FeedMail.
Also, while no SMTP gateway is in the works, we will be publishing an API to let anyone who wants to build authoring apps.
Thanks again.
Mike Buckbee
# Tim on September 1st, 2005
Thanks for making it Mike. It is a very interesting idea and I’d really like to see it develop further. Please do email us with each update.