I love the Bloglines feature that lets you subscribe to a mailing list using a generate bloglines.com address. It’s much more manageable for me to read email newsletters in an RSS reader than in my email client. In a New Years-inspired organizational frenzy, I decided to take advantage of this feature to streamline what I had to deal with in my Inbox.

Two problems. First, I’d have to unsubscribe and then resubscribe using the new bloglines.com address I create for the list. Second, for interactive lists where I mostly read but sometimes want to post, I want to read in Bloglines but be able to post as luke [at] lukemelia.com.

I came up with an elegant solution to the problem by using procmail. The usefulness of this post is limited to those with fairly sophisticated email setups. I host my mail along with this site at Pair Networks, which fortunately lets you get fairly sophisticated.

Anyway, I already have my mail routed through procmail, so I just added a recipe for each of my lists. If procmail sees that a message is from a mailing list (using criteria I specify, like a particular From address or a subject token), it forwards the message to the bloglines address I specify and discards it. Example recipe:

# filter Rude Awakening newsletter
:0
* ^From:.*Awake@dailyreckoning.com
! lukemelia.9893280@bloglines.com

This avoids lock-in to bloglines (not that I don’t love it, but lock-in is not cool…) and makes it easy to start receiving the mail in my inbox again if I choose to without resubscribing.