OK, I admit it. I am addicted to RSS feeds. They're really useful for monitoring multiple websites and I wouldn't get my daily fix of news if I wasn't subscribed to the CNN feed and the BBC feed. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time each day reading them so I cut out all the non-essentials and outright crap and came up with my best "must-have" 50 feeds (although sometimes that creeps up a bit if I have a run of good luck finding interesting blogs).

But quite often I am too busy to check my Google Reader app and when I do log in, I find 150+ new posts waiting for me. So when I was reading Steve Rubel's excellent "Micro Persuasion" blog, he mentioned that he has the same problem and he uses a service called RSSfwd to have new blog posts emailed to him. You still have the original posts sitting in your RSS reader but copies are emailed to you, free of charge.

What are the benefits of this service? Well for a start, I check email much more than I check RSS feeds. So if an interesting / important post is put on a blog, I am likely to see it faster if it is sent directly to my email inbox. Second, using Gmail's filters, I can have the email automatically labelled and, once it's read, archived so I end up with a database of posts from my favourite blogs. So if I need to find a certain post in the future, I can simply search my Gmail archive for it (Google Reader still doesn't have a "search" capability which, considering that Google is a search engine company, is really perplexing!)

The best way to set it up is to do what Steve suggests and set up a separate folder in your RSS reader (mine is "favs"). Then label the RSS feeds you want sent to you with the "favs" label and give the RSS links for your "favs" label to RSSfwd. That way, if you want to add or remove feeds from your RSSfwd mailings, all you have to do is add or remove the "favs" label, which is a lot easier than separately unsubscribing from each feed.

How do you keep on top of your RSS feeds? Can anyone suggest a better idea?