Get Twitter follower notifications by RSS

By default, Twitter sends you a new email whenever someone starts following your tweets. You can switch that option off in Twitter’s settings, but what if you’d prefer to have those notifications sent to an RSS feed rather than just disabled? Australian Forrester analyst Steven Noble came up with a neat solution: set up a specific email address to handle your Twitter correspondence and access that via your feed reader. Full instructions after the jump.

There are several ways to handle converting email to an RSS feed,
including installing mail2rss on your mail server. However, the least painful
method for most folks is probably to use Gmail.
Set up a new Gmail
account for your Twitter information (or for any other service that
doesn’t offer RSS but will send you emails). Change your notification
address in Twitter to this new email (under Settings). Then follow our
previous instructions on adding Gmail to your RSS reader,
and your new follower notifications will feed right through.
One disadvantage of this solution is that your feed reader has to
support authentication, which ironically enough isn’t an option yet for
Google Reader. As Steven points out in the comments below, Lifehacker US has a solution for that dilemma. Any other favourite ways of converting mail to an RSS
feed? Let us know in the comments. (Thanks, Steven!)