Every time I hear someone suggest the idea of using an RSS client to access their email, it boggles my mind anew. I can understand people casting about for a solution to the problem of spam (and the flood of legitimate email some people receive, for that matter), and the fact that newsfeed items disappear without you having to click "delete" would make that a little easier. But it seems the problems such a system would cause are more numerous than the advantages it would afford.

The first problem is the same thing that would make it nice for spam: your legitimate email would just disappear unless you took some steps to save it. I suppose some people might never receive emails they want to save, but not being one of them, this seems like a big issue to me.

Second, no feed reader that I'm aware of has a way to put individual items into folders for storage (aside from the issue of not having a method built in for storing things that was mentioned above).

Third is the issue of replying to emails. Again, I know of no feed reader (with the possible exception of Outlook plugin feed readers) that have an interface for responding to RSS items. I suppose if your email to RSS gateway put a mailto: link in as the link for the email, you could use it in conjunction with an email client to do that.

Fourth, I don't think I'd want my email to get mixed in with the regular newsfeeds I read. Some feed readers would help by letting you group feeds in one place and email accounts elsewhere, but still, I'd rather have my feed reader telling my I have new feed items to read, and my email client telling me I've got email.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see how reading email in an RSS reader is any better than reading it in an email client. If there are advantages, then the better answer is probably to add a feature or two to email client software instead.