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Argent is an RSS feed reader that can search feeds for specified patterns and send the results via email. The name derives from the phrase "RSS Agent". Argent is a Python script which uses a SQLite backend to track feed status. The input is a text file that describes the options and feeds to be processed. Argent is designed to be used on a server and driven by cron.

The benefits of using an RSS agent is that you can receive notifications of new posts almost immediately (dependent mainly on the frequency that Argent is invoked via cron) and you are guaranteed not to miss posts if you forget or are unable to check the feed manually. Of course, immediate notification also depends on your access to email; but at least you won't miss any. Having a smart phone helps considerably.

Argent's filtering capability also means that you only get notified about items that meet your search criteria. This, of course, works only as well as your search criteria: you will very likely get false positives and you could miss some items that your filters didn't capture. You will likely end-up needing to make a compromise to find the right balance (but at least you won't get inundated with junk you're not interested in).

Argent is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 or later.

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The current stable version is 1.2.0 (accessible via source tag).

Work is currently beginning on version 2.0.0 (see the Roadmap wiki article for details).

The 1.x series uses a home-grown RSS parser which has not been widely tested (but it has been used extensively on cragislist feeds, which is one of the great use cases for this tool). It will work well for you so long as it can handle the format of your feeds. If it cannot you will unfortunately have to wait for 2.0.0 (which will use the 'standard' Python module, feedparser) as I will not be updating the parser further. If a simple fix is required for some feed however, I may be persuaded to make a bug fix release. :) Give me a yell...