I imagine a site where you sign up and provide the login information for your e- mail account (POP3, IMAP, or various web- based services). It would provide you with a hash(*) with which you could receive an RSS feed of your e-mail, allowing you to preview the information regarding incoming mail in any way you want.

(*)By this I mean you are given a unique URL like http://rss.example.com/? 63726f697373616e74

Of course, this is not incredibly secure, as many RSS readers don't support password-protected feeds. Security measures could be added for some protection.
-- rgovostes, Aug 08 2004

Don't see why not. There are already webmail services that translate an IMAP4 account into HTML and WAP; shouldn't be too difficult to do it into RSS or Atom.

You'd do the security on the outside by using https: to access the RSS stream.

You'd probably want to make up new tags for e-mail specific things (e.g. References/threading headers, other recipients, click here to delete, click here to file somewhere, etc.)

What services does your RSS client give you that you miss in your e-mail client?
-- jutta, Aug 14 2004


GMail now offers this, so maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all :)
-- rgovostes, Jun 10 2005



random, halfbakery