Like a few others here, I use an RSS to email converter, although I'm using a custom-written one. The main difference from rss2email is that I'm not actually doing any SMTP - I'm just dumping files into a Maildir and letting isync do the uploading/downloading. The actual reading then happens mostly with Mutt (which also just interacts with Maildir).
Like some others have noted, using email as a storage mechanism reduces part of the problem (tracking which items are read/unread) to one that's already solved (by IMAP). Additionally, using isync lets me have local copies of everything; this used to be really important when I was a "poor" grad student, because I could do cool stuff like download a bunch of comics ahead of time on my laptop, then read webcomics/mailing-lists on the 2-hour bus ride. I still like having local copies of things on principle, although nowadays everybody is always-connected so it's not as useful.