I very infrequently use Craigslist, but as a coincidence I just started looking for something as this HN submission came out. I had it in the back of my mind to set up some feeds; I was moments away from finding out first-hand that the feature is not there when I spotted this story on HN.
With this dumb move, Craigslist has become monumentally less usable.
Craigslist was my main use case for RSS. I would set up complex searches, "RSS them", and just watch items drip into the mail-inbox-like UI abstraction of the feed reader. I could browse the items. Mark them read and unread, like e-mails. I could delete unwanted items and thereby make them disappear forever. The items are beautifully condensed in a tight list view.
None of this is possible with the regular Craiglist web UI. Repeat the same search and the same crap is there.
I noticed the e-mail alerts feature next to the search box, so I created an account to try it out.
It works sporadically; the e-mails are not timely. It takes hours and hours to report on a new item. If it's something hard to find and in demand, someone will snag it before you. RSS refresh intervals can be tuned, like once an hour or whatever, and they execute exactly as specified.
It reported a few new items. But now, I just received an e-mail from it which regurgitated sixty old items, which existed long before the time before I created the alert for the very search which found those items.
Pretty useless. Phooey!