Use Gmail to search torrents

Gmail 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.

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.