gmail headers via atom feeds with geektool

16 Apr 2005

as you may or may not know, gmail provides an interface to your gmail by using atom feeds. to do this, you need to browse to:
https://USER:PASS@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom
USER and PASS are your gmail username and password. today, i was hacking through some my shell scripts for use with geektool and decided it would be useful to see my new gmail messages on my desktop. hey? why not right? since geektool makes everything so simple, the hardest part was to get the atom feed to show up properly with a script. enter magpierss. magpierss provides an xml parser in php. i’m sure there are plenty of other ways to do this, but to me, this was the easiest and quickest.

download the script here. the output looks something like this once combined with geektool:

just setup geektool to refresh the command ‘php gmailrss.php’ every 5 minutes or so and it will update on the desktop. this was a very quick script and it gets the job done. now i dont have to go to gmail to see my headers.

braytek, geektool, atom, magpierss

10 Responses to gmail headers via atom feeds with geektool

May 24th, 2005 at 5:14 pm

i can’t get this to work, magpiers doens’t want to process the httpS

blacknight

August 3rd, 2005 at 8:24 am

Does not work for me. Tried with the last magprierss version (0.71.1).

Any help greatly appreciated.

Bwana

August 3rd, 2005 at 11:39 am

ever since geektool decided not to support mac os x tiger, i haven’t been able to use this anymore. hopefully, if they change their stance, i’ll be able to troubleshoot this better.

Bwana

August 3rd, 2005 at 11:46 am

i just ran a quick test independent of geektool and it works fine. make sure you change the path inside the script to point to rss_fetch.inc. the line is

require('/path/to/rss_fetch.inc')

you need to change this ‘/path/to’ to the correct path. Also make sure you change the USER and PASS in the $url statement to your gmail user and pass.

Good luck.

Mac

October 1st, 2008 at 3:38 am

This post is very old but I've just switched to os x and learning all the neat things geektool can do. When I run https://USER:PASS@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/ato...all I get is the following message: "Channel: Gmail – Inbox for USER@gmail.com" I don't see actual emails. Am I missing something?