How To Email Yourself New Craigslist Search Results

Craigslist.org is an online wanted ads site that’s been around for a bit. It’s a great tool if you are looking to buy something second hand. As mentioned in other MakeUseOf articles, its design leaves something to be desired but there is no doubt to its usefulness. There are some irritations such as the absence of pictures in the Craigslist search results (check out David Pierce’s list of 5 Tools To Make Craigslist Even More Useful for “ByeByeList”) and they could do a bit better with local search options like having the ability to set a search radius (check out Craiglook).

I also noticed that Craigslist does not offer the ability (out-of-the-box at least) email yourself new Craigslist search results. These basically include latest advertisements you care about. Do you ever get tired of constantly running the same search over and over, hoping the item you’re looking for will show up? Well, since Craigslist search makes use of RSS feeds (Track A Craigslist Category In a Feed Reader), searching for the same item multiple times is a complete waste of time. Let me show you how to take a search term, find the RSS feed for that search term, and have the feed updates emailed to you!

Let’s start with Craigslist, the search, and the feed.

First find your local Craigslist page. Head to Craigslist.org, and look to the lists off to the right to find your local country, state or city (or nearest).

Once you find the closest location you can find, search for what you are looking for.  Just type something in the search box.  NOTE: you may find better, more narrowed search results by navigating to a category and then running the search, but it’s all up to you.

One thing that Craigslist does do right is it adds RSS feeds… everywhere!  For instance, they have feeds set up for categories, subcategories and even search terms!  In each case, just check out the bottom right corner of the page for the RSS icon.

Now all there is to do is have the FEED updates emailed to you.

There is a tool called FeedMyInbox (for more information on the tool, check out MakeUseOf’s overview).  Basically this site offers you the ability to enter a feed and your email address, and have the updates sent directly to your inbox.  You can do this without even signing up for an account! Please note that email updates will only be sent once every 24 hours with all updates from that time frame.

So, head back to Craigslist to copy the feed for your Craigslist search. The easiest way to do this is to right-click on the RSS icon and click COPY (or COPY LINK LOCATION – may depend on your browser of choice).

Now head over to FeedMyInbox and paste the feed address into the website URL field.  Then, obviously, enter your email address into the email address field.

Next, you will have a verification email sent to you to make sure it was really you who signed up to receive the updates.

Just click the confirmation link knowing that you always have the option to cancel the updates anytime you want.

And that’s how to save the time of repeating a Craigslist search over and over on Craigslist by have the results sent directly to your email inbox! Did you find this helpful? I am sure there are tons of other ways to email yourself Craigslist search results. Do you have another method? We’d love to hear it in the comments.

Image credits: MorgueFile.com