rssmail

The purpose of this script is to send an email for each new item found in an RSS feed. In my main workflow email is very important. I mainly use this script to follow a number of security related RSS feeds and recieve email alerts when new issue's are published.

Commandline options

The following commandline options are available:

-h

Shows a brief usage message.

-c <file>

Overrides the default confgifile locations.

-m

Send an email for every new item in the feed.

-k

Create an item in kanboard for every new item in the feed.

-K

Create an item in kanboard for every new item in the feed and if there is one or more item, send a mail new items have been created.

-d

Increase debugging level. Debug messages are written to stderr, prepended by a timestamp and the logging level. This can be used for logging. Levels are:

• 1 Basic flow of actions
• 2 More detailed flow of actions
• 3 Show item filtering decisions
• 4 Show config reading and writing

Configuration

The configuration file is searched for at the locations below in the specified order. As soon as a configuration file is found, searching is stopped.

~/.rssmail.cfg /etc/rssmail.cfg

These locations are not checked when the configuration file location is overridden from the commandline.

Lines in the configuration file that are empty or start with a # will be ignored. So it is possible to add comments in the file.

The configuration file has a .ini style format. There is a main section which specifies gobal settings and a section per configured feed.

Generic settings

These settings should be set in section [main].

emailto

The specifies 1 or more email (comma seperated) email addresses where output is sent to.

For example, send mail to admin user:

emailto=admin@example.com

Send mail to Alice and Bob:

emailto=alice@example.com,bob@example.com

emailfrom

This specifies the sending email address. Can be useful for filtering.

Send mail as user rssfeed:

emailfrom=rssfeed@example.com

xmlstarlet

This specifies the command name for the xmlstarlet package. When not defined it defaults to xmlstart.

Override the command to xml:

xmlstartlet=xml

proxy

This specifies a proxy to use when retrieving the RSS feed. Without this option no specific proxy is set, but any proxy defined in the environment will not be removed.

Set proxy to wwwproxy with port 3128

proxy=wwwproxy:3128

ipv4only

This forces the RSS feed URL's to be retrieved over IPv4 only.

Force connection over IPv4

ipv4only=1

kanboardapikey

This is the API key in kanboard that needs to be used to use the API.

kanboardapi

This is the URL where the kanboard API can be reached.

kanboardproject

Name of the kanboard project into which the items need to be created.

Feeds

It is possible to specify 1 or more feeds in the configuration file. Each feed requires its own section.

The section name is the shorthand name for the feed. The name can not contain spaces.

Below are the elements that can be defined for a feed.

timestamp (mandatory)

When initially specifying a feed, this field should be defined empty:

timestamp=

It will be updated automatically when the feed is processed.

url (mandatory)

This is the url of the RSS feed that needs to be parsed.

For example:

url=https://act.eff.org/action.atom

titleexclude (optional)

This option specifies a pattern that will be applied to the title of a feed item. If the pattern matches, the item will not be processed.

The pattern is matched using egrep. Compatible patterns can be used.

For example:

titleexclude=exclude this title|exclude other title

titleinclude (optional)

This option specifies a pattern that will be applied to the title of a feed item. If the pattern matches, the item will be processed.

The pattern is matched using egrep. Compatible patterns can be used.

titleinclude=include this title|include other title

linkexclude (optional)

This option specifies a pattern that will be applied to the link of a feed item. If the pattern matches, the item will not be processed.

The pattern is matched using egrep. Compatible patterns can be used.

For example:

linkexclude=exclude this link|exclude other link

linkinclude (optional)

This option specifies a pattern that will be applied to the link of a feed item. If the pattern matches, the item will be processed.

The pattern is matched using egrep. Compatible patterns can be used.

linkinclude=include this link|include other link

Running

The script has a couple of dependancies. The script checks if these are available.

The script can be started without arguments:

rssmail

It wil show help output.

It is most useful to start it from cron. For example every hour, 10 past the hour send email for all matches:

10 * * * * /home/user/bin/rssmail -m