RSS Mailer is a small django application for watching changes in channels in pretty much any format supported by FeedParser library and sending these changes by email. It uses django-celery for asynchronous messaging.

Configuration (settings.py)

rssmailer of course has to be present in INSTALLED_APPS

Celery setup

import djcelery
djcelery.setup_loader()

Celery does not autodetect tasks package, we have to manually specify each task file CELERY_IMPORTS = ( 'rssmailer.tasks.feeder', 'rssmailer.tasks.mail', )

For debugging purposes (rssmailer logs information about it's status mostly on INFO level): CELERYD_LOG_LEVEL = "INFO"

Broker setup (RabbitMQ)

This example uses RabbitMQ, but you can use anything that Celery supports. BROKER_HOST = "" BROKER_PORT = default 5672 BROKER_USER = "" BROKER_PASSWORD = "" BROKER_VHOST = ""

Periodic feed updates

update_feeds task should be regularly run. This example will run this task every 60 seconds. You can also use cron-like syntax, see Celery docs.

from datetime import timedelta

CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULE = {
    "update-feeds": {
        "task": "rssmailer.tasks.feeder.update_feeds",
        "schedule": timedelta(seconds=60),
    },
}

rssmailer-specific settings

Mandatory settings

RSSMAILER_FROM = "<email-address-appearing-in-From-header>"

Optional settings

How many recipients can be in one email. Problem is that we can possibly have a lot of email address in our database and SMTP server might not be able to cope with it if we sent them all in one email.

RSSMAILER_RECIPIENTS = 3

Which attributes should be considered for computing uniqueness-hash of the entry? RSS standard states that the only mandatory item in RSS <item> is <title> or <summary>. Therefore we can't rely solely on ID. RSSMAILER_UNIQUENESS = ['title', 'description', 'guid', 'updated']

Which task should consume new entries? It has to be a Celery task (annotated or inherited from Task) RSSMAILER_CONSUMER = "rssmailer.tasks.mail.send"

Entries in RSS feeds often change their content because of changes in their corresponding articles/posts/etc on site. This setting will avoid sending multiple changes if the change in the entry is not in it's id but for example in the summary or title. RSSMAILER_GUID_ONLY = True

TODO

• use Bcc while sending one email to multiple recipients