Use Gmail to search torrents
Written by Ernesto on August 19, 2006Gmail is more than a useful email service. In just a few steps you can turn it into your personal torrent search engine. And by using labels and filters you can keep your inbox clean.
Why should I care?
Well, it helps you to track your favorite tv-show, artist, linux distro or anticipated release. By using rss-feeds, you don’t need to search manually, and the torrents you’re interested in will be forwarded to your gmail account.
Step 1
Find an rss-feed for your favorite content. RSS feeds keep track of the latest torrents. The good thing is that sites like torrentz and mininova offer search related feeds. So, what you need to do is search for the content you need, and copy the url of the search feed.
This article if you are particulary interested in TV-torrents
For example, A search for “knoppix” (torrentz | mininova) will give you a list of results and an RSS feed (torrentz | mininova.
Now, copy the url of the RSS feed and go to step 2
Step 2
Now we have our RSS feed. You could of course put this feed in your favorite RSS reader, but we want to use Gmail to do the job, and nicely archive the torrents. So, go to rssfwd and enter the url of your search feed, and your email address. Rssfwd will now forward all new torrents to your gmail account.
Step 3
It might be a good idea to organize your incoming torrents in Gmail, especially if you expect a lot of messages. Gmail’s Labels and Filters are great tools to do this.
First, create a label where you want the torrents to go to. In the picture below I use the labels “misc torrents” and tv torrents”. To create a label go to settings > labels in Gmail, and create a label for your incoming torrents.
The last step is to filter your incoming torrents, let them skip the inbox, and move them to your labeled folder. In gmail, go to settings > filters. Make sure that you choose the proper criteria. Then set the option to move the incoming messages to the “label” you just created.
That’s it
You will now receive your favorite torrents by email. Check out Scott’s blog for a similar tutorial.
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15 Responses
Hey thanks alot for the tip!
This should work with any email service not just gmail. ( Except for the lables bit )
very nice idea… but i use http://www.torrent-search-bar.com as a torrent RSS reader. cool…
[quote comment="19331"]very nice idea… but i use http://www.torrent-search-bar.com as a torrent RSS reader. cool…[/quote]
What a shame to spread such crap. “Torrent Search” is SPYWARE!!!! BEWARE FOLKS!!! DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT!!!!
[quote comment="19331"]very nice idea… but i use http://www.torrent-search-bar.com as a torrent RSS reader. cool…[/quote]
I want to clarify my previous post, so that you understand why Merav Gil’s posting should NOT, under any circumstances, be taken seriously and why I have enough reasons to believe that “TorrentSearchBar” is SPYWARE, which means that you are putting your privacy at risk to a scam company by downloading this crap!!! :
1) It secretly (WITHOUT the user’s consent) sends packets to the company, Conduit.
2) EVEN IF YOU UNINSTALL IT, it keeps sending your surfing habits to search.conduit.com. For instance, if you search on Google, the results will be secretly redirected to search.conduit.com. Just run netstat (start -> run… -> cmd -> netstat /a), and you will surely understand what I’m talking about!
3) There are many people who have already shown their grave doubts about this scam company. See it for yourself: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360920
4) Don’t believe all the comments on Mozilla’s extension site, as the author deliberately have chosen to delete many negative posts. Also, if you look at the pattern of the positive postings, you will see that they are written in poor english, meaning that most of those comments belong to people affiliated with the software. Besides, most of those comments are considered “not helpful” by most people.
To Merav Gil, STOP SPREADING SPYWARE!!!
rssfwd is down
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