> Right now I follow a few Mastodon users via an RSS-to-Email service, > but the problem with that is that you can't follow private > accounts/see followers-only toots. It would be great to have a full > email bridge. Ah yes know exactly what you mean. I follow Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy stuff via RSS too. I have a little program which follows/unfollows: apfollow kevincox@lemmy.ml apfollow -u kevincox@lemmy.ml Then things get delivered to my inbox. That's been working ok. I'm adding a "Following" section to the docs soon. But I think the main idea is getting Activity into a RFC5322 message in a filesystem. The system doesn't really care how that file is written. It could be from an ActivityPub server sending stuff to you. But it could also be from reading a RSS feed and fetching the items. My first stab at this was actually a couple of scripts which dumped my Mastodon timeline and some Lemmy stuff to message files. > So if my ActivityPub-email bridge was running you wouldn't also be > able to access a Mastodon UI and for example browse other posts. What I do now is clunky. First, I've written a couple of very basic frontends using both the Lemmmy & Mastodon API. These expose the unique ID of each post, which I copy/paste around... > (like commenting on a random post I was linked to). I run this command: apubget -m https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238 > comment.eml Then open the file in a mail client, and reply to it. Like I said: pretty clunky! :D One thing I've thought about is hijacking the header's Subject field to hint to apas that we're replying to something. Modifying Subject is exposed in more mail clients than being able to modify arbitrary fields in the header (ideally we set `In-Reply-To`). For example for this message I'm writing now: To: kevincox@lemmy.ml Subject: https://lemmy.ml/comment/9266238 Ah yes know exactly what you mean bla bla bla... Taking it further, frontends could render `mailto:` links. Here's one to reply to your message: `mailto:kevincox@lemmy.ml?cc=fediverse@lemmy.world&subject=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fcomment%2F9266238` Using Subject as both the `name` or `inReplyTo` properties of an Activity depending on its value feels unclear. Reading [RFC 6068], it's theoretically possible that we could inject a `In-Reply-To` in a `mailto` URL. It's up to the mail application to interpret it. `mailto:kevincox@lemmy.ml?cc=fediverse@lemmy.world&in-reply-to=%3Chttps%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fcomment%2F9266238%3E` This encodes the message: To: kevincox@lemmy.ml CC: fediverse@lemmy.world In-Reply-To: bla bla bla Just tested and found that [MailMate] actually handles this. Still feels unclear... I dunno. What do you think? [MailMate]: https://freron.com [RFC 6068]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6068#section-4

I've updated the docs with new sections Receiving and Reading. See 2.3.1 etc. https://apubtest2.srcbeat.com/apas.html Thanks for your comment as it helped me write down thoughts :)