Feature Suggestion: Email-to-RSS?

[Elsie Hupp]

Disclaimer:

I recognize that this is low priority, so I'm posting this here mainly for the purpose of asking what might be involved in implementing it. I might take a stab at it myself at some point, but other than that I recognize that probably no one else will. Anyway...

Introduction

This feature suggestion is almost entirely prompted by an issue with Substack: namely, while Substack supports RSS for free/public blog posts, paid posts other than podcast posts are exclusively available as email newsletters and on the web. (I'm sure other platforms do similar things, but Substack is the biggest example for me.)

In looking for a way to turn email-only newsletters into RSS feeds for my personal use, I found David Blume's project email-feed, and I specifically noticed that it is written in Python, as is the "glue" part of Mail-in-a-Box. My question, then, is what might be involved in integrating email-feed (or something similar) into Mail-in-a-Box?

Hypothesis

As far as I understand how Mail-in-a-Box works, my best guess is that integrating email-feed would involve the following:

• Integrating email-feed with the Python backend of Mail-in-a-Box for per-account authentication;
• Presumably fleshing out the functionality of email-feed to some extent, e.g. for full-text access and password protection;
• Implementing some sort of GUI frontend for configuration as an HTML/JavaScript template.

I guess my main question to start is this:

For the first bullet point, is there a particular API hook for using Mail-in-a-Box accounts for client authentication? Basically, what would be involved in, say, enumerating Mail-in-a-Box accounts and providing secure access (IMAP or otherwise) to those accounts' data?

This integration would also have to provide the ability, for example, of using HTTP authentication on the RSS feeds, though token-based URL obfuscation as per Patreon and Substack's podcast RSS is an option, if probably a bit more complicated to implement given the necessity for an additional GUI frontend.

Conclusion

Again, I recognize that this quite a bit beyond the core scope of Mail-in-a-Box, so I would like to emphasize again that I'm posting this Issue in order to ask questions about what would be involved in implementing it, not as a demand that anyone other than myself personally do so. (Yes, I know there's also the Mail-in-a-Box Discord, but it seems like that is more geared towards administration as opposed to development.)