Yahoo! Mail for RSS

Yahoo! is set to unveil a new Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed alert service and integration of RSS feeds into its new Yahoo! Mail beta, making the company the first to offer RSS in a major web-based email system.

The new RSS feed alert service will allow people to receive alerts via email, instant message or SMS message, just as they can currently receive alerts for news stories about a specified topic, stock moves and game scores.

Scott Gatz, senior director of personalisation products for Yahoo!, said: "You can get an alert for any RSS feed out there on the internet. There are a million different feeds that people have subscribed to using Yahoo! products," including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mobile and My Yahoo!. People can subscribe to RSS feeds by typing in the feed's web address at Yahoo!'s alerts service page or choose from a list on the My Yahoo! website, Gatz said.

Within a week or so, RSS feed publishers will be able to put a button on their websites that will allow people to subscribe to the feeds there and receive them in their Yahoo! services, he said.

Yahoo! is also integrating the My Yahoo! RSS feed subscriptions directly into the new Yahoo! Mail beta test service so people can read them when they check their email, archive them and easily forward them to people in their contact list.

Users will be able to click on an "All Feeds" icon on the side of the email interface and see the full RSS posts from the My Yahoo! page, a selection of the most popular feeds or feeds that have been manually chosen.

Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com