E-mail items to Instapaper

I use Instapaper every day, as a means of saving off pages that I come across but don’t have the time to read/evaluate immediately.  And when I’m working on a computer this is all well and good–the Instapaper bookmarklet allows me to save pages quickly and move on.

The problem arises when I’m viewing content on my mobile phone, as the concept of a bookmarklet in any mobile browser that I’ve had the pleasure of using does not exist.  To make matters worse, I’m one of the five or six people on Earth who does not own an iPhone.  So, the surely-pleasant Instapaper apps are dead to me.

For some time, I’ve been using the “Send this Page” functionality built in to my mobile browser to e-mail pages to a mailbox for further processing.  Some simple mailbox rules and a short list of known source addresses make this a viable solution.  Unfortunately, viable is never good enough.

To scratch this itch, I’ve thrown together a small collection of scripts that will:

1. Retrieve messages from an IMAP mailbox (this needn’t be a dedicated inbox–a specific folder, Gmail label, etc. will suffice).
2. Validate senders using a whitelist.
3. Extract things that look and smell like URLs from message bodies (should handle crappy HTML messages, too).
4. Submit URLs to Instapaper.

Surprisingly, it works (for me).  Requires Python 2.5+ (haven’t tested with 3.X, but should work), and an IMAP-enabled mailbox of some sort.

Head on over to Code for the latest version (IPMailer).