10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal

As I wanted to pass my newsfeeds from Mail.app to a friend I realized that there is no "Export RSS-feeds to ..." button in Mail.app. So I wrote this little workaround to export them in Terminal (assuming the bash default shell):

IFS=$'\n';for i in $(find ~/Library/Mail/RSS/ -name "Info.plist");do grep "<string>http://" $i | sed "s/.*\(http[^<]*\).*/\1/";done

This exports all URLs from your Mail.app RSS directory directly into the shell. I could then easily pass this list to my friend. As an additional option, here is a little modification to open all feed URLs in the default web browser:

IFS=$'\n';for i in $(find ~/Library/Mail/RSS/ -name "Info.plist");do open $(grep "<string>http://" $i | sed "s/.*\(http[^<]*\).*/\1/;s/http/feed/");done

This opens your feeds in the browser with a feed://... URL. Then you can easily add them to your bookmarks bar, or can do something other with them. Note that you may add && sleep 60 after the last bracket if you have lots of feeds in Mail.app.

#!/bin/sh # version 1.2 # * added the htmlURL field for Wordpress # * escaped XML special strings from the title field # Written by Sameer D'Costa and released into the public domain # http://dcostanet.net/wordpress/2005/06/13/export-safari-rss-feeds-via-opml/ cat << HEADER <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>Safari OPML Export</title> </head> <body> <outline text="Mail Feeds"> HEADER sqlite3 ~/Library/Syndication/Database3 'select * from Sources;' | \ sed -e 's/&/\&amp\;/g' -e 's/</\&lt\;/g' -e 's/>/\&gt\;/g' -e 's/"/\&quot\;/g' -e 's/\x2C/\&#39/g' | \ awk -F"|" '{printf "<outline type=\"rss\" text=\"\" title=\"%s\" xmlUrl=\"%s\"\ />\ ", $4, $2 }' IFS=$'\n';for i in $(find ~/Library/Mail/RSS/ -name "Info.plist");do grep "<string>http://" $i | sed -e "s/.*$http[^<]*$.*/\1/" | xargs echo "<outline type=\"rss\" text=\"\" title=\"$BASH_ARGV\" xmlUrl=\"$BASH_ARGV\" \/>";done cat << FOOTER </outline> </body> </opml> FOOTER Thanks, Calvin

#!/bin/bash of=/dev/stdout [ $# -gt 0 ] && of=$1 cat > "$of" << HEADER <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>Mail RSS OPML Export</title> </head> <body> <outline text="Mail Feeds"> HEADER for mbox in ~/Library/Mail/RSS/*.rssmbox do title=$(echo ${mbox##*/} | sed 's:.rssmbox::') url=$(defaults read "${mbox}/Info" RSSFeedURLString) echo "<outline type=\"rss\" text=\"\" title=\"$title\" xmlUrl=\"$url\" />" done >> "$of" cat >> "$of" << FOOTER </outline> </body> </opml> FOOTER

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10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: JaxMyers on Wed, Mar 26 2008 at 8:13AM PDT

Thanks for the hint. I was trying to figure out how to do this the other day...

10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: chleuasme on Wed, Mar 26 2008 at 10:49PM PDT

You can simply use defaults ;-)

for i in ~/Library/Mail/RSS/*/Info.plist
do
    defaults read "${i%.plist}" RSSFeedURLString
done

And xargs too

for i in ~/Library/Mail/RSS/*/Info.plist
do
    defaults read "${i%.plist}" RSSFeedURLString
done | xargs -n 1 open

10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: chill_apple on Wed, Apr 9 2008 at 11:07AM PDT

I was trying to get to work so that i can port it to NewsFire. I am not very good at BASH and here is what I came up with (Well I borrowed the script that someone did for Safari). NOTE: I left the code that pulls it out of Safari. Any help would be appreciated.

10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: chleuasme on Sun, Apr 13 2008 at 6:33AM PDT

I just read your post. Here is a bash script which should allow you to import the Mail RSS feeds in NewsFire :

With no option, it should work the same ways the one you gave code, or you can give an output file name as argument.

10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: kson on Fri, Mar 28 2008 at 6:43AM PDT

If you want to export your RSS feeds, you can just drag them from Mail.app to Vienna or similar. So I guess it will work to just drag and drop them on a textarea to get the same results as your script. Can´t test though cause I have no feeds in my Mail anymore

10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: wjv on Tue, May 27 2008 at 5:55AM PDT

pubsub --client com.apple.mail list

Or, if you want only the URLs:

pubsub --client com.apple.mail list | cut -f3 | sed -ne '3,$p'

10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: ATADABUFUG on Fri, Jun 27 2008 at 4:45PM PDT

kudos!

10.5: Export Mail.app's RSS feed URLs in Terminal
Authored by: ericlundstedt on Tue, Jul 15 2008 at 11:14AM PDT

i also discovered that you can drag and drop between Safari Bookmarks (where your RSS feeds also live) and NetNewsWire. Just open the bookmarks in Safari, select all the feeds, and drag over to NetNewsWire's window. Alot simpler than all this terminal stuff.....(showing my lack of geek-cred).

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