gmail headers via atom feeds with geektool

April 16, 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