Main Hantam Saja

GMail already supports RSS feeds (without attachments unfortunately) and that if used incorrectly can indeed be a security vunerability.

However, these are locally hosted, user created RSS feed based off of SSL POP access to a GMail account. Where’s the security vunerability there if that RSS feed is never posted online? The beauty of this, it’s not meant to be posted online - its a feed of YOUR GMail that you can plug into iTunes or any other podcatcher and automatically get mp3s sent to your GMail account added to your mp3 player. A corollary to that is you could post this feed online and let other people subscribe to your GMail inbox, but that’s not the point of the story.

The Google supplied GMail feed does not support attachments, so this is more of a notification rather then a podcast client.. BUT this is a suggestion a POP3 to RSS translation. Googling for a solution led to a page where someone had clearly already thought of this idea back in FEBRUARY. Interestingly enough it was while getting the Mailfeed PHP script to work with GMail that led to them.

It’s an interesting idea but with a few issues with it though…

• If the email account was known, then there’s nothing to stop anybody else from inserting their own stuff into your “feed” by simply emailing it to your gmail account. This could be worked around with a clever combination of labels and/or filters though.
• GMail’s built-in RSS feeds, at the moment, require a password to access them. So anybody getting your feed (if it was direct through GMail) has your account password.
• GMail’s feed doesn’t convert attachments to enclosures, so using their RSS feed is a dead end anyway.
• Making a POP3 to RSS converter would be possible, however you still need to:
1. Host that RSS locally.
2. Provide enclosures which allow listeners to get the content, which they can’t do if you leave it on the GMail account. So the bandwidth problem isn’t solved there. In the case of distributing podcasts through GMail- if listeners were subscribed to their GMail accounts and you sent an email to 100 listener’s GMail accounts, your bandwidth is just for uploading the podcast one time. It’s like a podcast e-newsletter. Whatever program/script we develop to do this would need to separate different incoming podcasts somehow.
• If you want to make an RSS feed for your own account which supports enclosures, thus letting people send you audio to listen to via a podcast client, then that would be possible, but given the setup of GMail, it’s the only real useful thing you could do with this idea. Once you have hundreds of people doing that, you could potentially just gmail them all your podcast, and therefore, bandwidth is just the cost of you uploading your podcast once to GMail, google takes care of the rest.

Mix in a little GMailFS and if you email out a podcast with the subject of GMAILFS: foofilename.mp3 [foosize;a;1] then GMailFS users will automatically download the file to their GMail Drive. Now its just a matter of dumping these files automatically into an mp3 player. Perhaps a script to generate an RSS feed off the files in the GMail Drive? It doesn’t have to be RSS neccesarily either here, but most podcatchers understand RSS enclosures so it’d be an easier way to interface them.

If someone wrote a program that did all of this using GMailFS or equivalent perhaps they should call it Poodcatcher

Here’s some solutions:

Solution 1) Email files to GmailFS users with the subject of GMAILFS: foofilename.mp3 [foosize;a;1] and the podcasts will automatically be available on everyone’s gmail drives. GmailFS download.

Solution 2) Use Gmail POP access plus a script that converts POP mail to RSS like this one or this one.