There's a lot of talk about RSS replacing email for various tasks such as online newsletters, so RSS is an email competitor, right? On the other hand, Aaron Schwartz posted today about an update to his rss2email script, which lets you subscribe to RSS feeds and have them delivered to you by email, and Lockergnome had a post about Dodgeit, which offers free disposable email address that you can check using an RSS feed, so RSS and email must be on the same team!

Coworkers? Competitors? Nah, they're coexisters. They're tools that people can use as needed to provide themselves the best online experience.

"My enemy's enemy is my friend."
Spammers are an enemy to both email and RSS. They may not have made much of an attack on RSS yet, but with advertising making it's way into newsfeeds, they can't be far off. RSS and email should be able to work together to block spam. Perhaps both could work with the same database for a Bayesian filter. Certainly RSS tool developers can learn from the experience of email filter developers when working on technology to block RSS spam.

Although with the glut of spam that already comes to my inbox, I can't imagine why anyone would want RSS feeds sent to them by email, I do like the idea of accessing email via RSS. One of the things I love abut RSS is that I don't have to delete the things I'm not interested in for them to go away. I also like that I can get just a little bit of an item, and then download the rest only if I'm interested.

Maybe we could have public email addresses that come to us as RSS feeds, and have a way in the RSS reader (the email-to-RSS service could insert this) to say "send this message to my normal email account", which would be a private address. Your private address could be given to friends and trusted individuals to speed legitimate messages to your inbox. (Of course, if they put you in an Outlook address book, then next worm might make your private address public).

The problem with this idea is that it adds an extra step to reading each legitimate message. But with spam outnumbering legitimate email these days, unless you've got a filter that improves that ratio, it might be quicker to accept the good than to delete the bad!