Ahh man. Google just killed Google Reader, again!
As was seen from a recent rant about google there is a little water under the bridge between us, and I would have to say it started on July 1st 2013 when Google killed Google Reader. For those unfamiliar with it, it was an RSS feed aggregator that allowed you to subscribe to blogs, news feeds, or really any webpage that supported RSS to have all that stuff in one need little feed. For those of you who are now wondering what RSS is, well, when Google killed reader it really put the nail in the coffin in RSS, but it was (and still is but lost traction) a Really Simple Syndication system that allowed an easy way to subscribe to any changes published to a website. I pointed Google Reader to the RSS of all my favorite websites and could read any new content at my leisure, in my own time, without fear of missing anything.
When it’s demise was announced, oh my what a coincidence, the same day I am writing this but 12 years later:
it began a frantic search for an alternative.
Being leery of relying on others I settled on feed2imap and it has been working like a charm for the last 12 years, until last week when it was unable to upload any new feeds to my Google IMAP account:
1 | I, [2025-05-07T18:17:00.156570 #810000] INFO -- : Feed2Imap V.1.2.7 started |
and the mail reader I have been using to read those feeds, k9mail, also began throwing an “Authentication failed” error. This was all right before jumping on a plane to NY, so I was not able to troubleshoot too much, but assumed I just had setup an app password which is a big long hash that was recommend to use when giving apps access to your email so that each ones access could be independently modified and monitored. But for the life of me I could not find it in my settings (I have never used the gmail web client as it is the most ass backwards interface I have ever encountered) and was getting quite frustrated until I found a direct link to the settings and got this wonderful result:
At that point I tried one last ditch effort to create a whole new gmail account for the feeds but had the same problem, and finally realized that google has removed app passwords and would appear any password based access to their mail services.
So now back from NY and at home this afternoon I began investigating how to revive my feed2imap home rolled reader and have realized that in the name of security, it would appear no big email providers allow basic authentication (simple password access) to email (disclaimer: plan B was hotmail and they discontinued it in 2023)
so I would need to update feed2imap to support OAuth2, which is not going to happen.
For now I have signed up for NewsBlur and will give it a try.
So, thank you Google for killing my Reader not just once, but twice!
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).