Question about Gmail Atom feed

And how it works

[Sanenet]

Rss is not my strong point, but I can't actually see the point of this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
- <feed version="0.3" xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#">
<title>Gmail - Inbox for [e-mail]</title>
<tagline>New messages in your Gmail Inbox</tagline>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://gmail.google.com/gmail" type="text/html" />
<modified>2004-10-04T16:11:47Z</modified>
</feed>

It's the feed given when you click into the Atom RSS feed out of Gmail - but what does it do? The "alternate" rel tag just calls the same page!

[TheDoctor]

I know next to nothing about Gmail, but I suspect that if, rather than clicking on the link, you copied it into your newsfeed aggregator, then you'd be informed via the newsfeed whenever you received new messages in your Gmail inbox.

[Sanenet]

I tried that, it didn't seem to do anything - and today the feed has gone.

Ah well.