Lately I had to sign up to a site to get access to the answers to questions posted on their forum. How did I know that the site had answers? Well, Google showed me the question and part of the answer when I searched for the exact error message for a problem I was having, but when I followed the link from Google to the site I found I couldn't view the answer unless I became a (free) member.
I retreated back to Google to find to my dismay that there's no cached copy of the page I want. So, I became a member of the site, found the answer, and moved on. Now, two weeks later, I notice I've got two weekly newsletters from the site in my inbox.
This is not a problem as the newsletter is actually quite good, but it's just that I don't want to put aside time to read mailing-list type stuff on my personal e-mail. Luckily this site has the option not to receive newsletters and has an RSS feed, so I can still read the content when I read my feeds and my inbox stays clean.
I did some quick hunting around to find two sites that will give out an e-mail address and then allow you to subscribe to your “inbox” using RSS:
This seems like a useful service to have. I'll give one or both of them a try and see how I go.
UPDATE: To use MailbyRss you sign up, they provide you with an e-mail address (a GUID), and whenever you mail something to this mail address it is “posted” to a web page that's kind of like a blog-lite, which has an RSS feed. Pretty simple. MailbyRss allows two optional tags in the e-mail that you send to be “posted” - an abstract for the entry, and an alternate date for the date of the posting.
MailbyRss looks like it is set up for corporate users as a subset of a larger suite of tools. Its creators advertise it as another information stream to potential buyers of your product or existing users for support.
The advantages of MailbyRss are that it would be hard for someone to guess the e-mail address used to post. The resulting content is available to anyone, though.
MailBucket seems similar but both the e-mail used to post and the resulting content are open to anyone. It seems to be targeted at developers who do not have time to read all the posts on a mailing list and instead prefer to consume the information using RSS. I think the downfall is lack of unique identity - there's no sign up, just check if your desired address is in use (the e-mail address for the “inbox“ becomes the web address to get the RSS from) - which means mailing list information I send to a MailBucket e-mail address might be hijacked by someone else (unless I'm getting the site horribly wrong, which is a possibility).