By my reading, prior to Dec 2013, the old terms[1] permitted using personal RSS readers but forbade aggregators. However, the new terms are much more restrictive; they prohibit any use of the craigslist website outside of a web browser. Thus, I think that it is now against the terms to use an RSS reader to read the craigslist RSS feeds! (By the way, it is also against the craigslist terms to write a crawler such as google.com or archive.org even if it respects robots.txt!)
I happened to review these terms because I too was sent a letter from Brian Hennessy representing craigslist last Friday regarding a little Chrome extension I wrote a couple years ago[2].
How can Craigslist accuse you of violating their terms of use? The act of providing a chrome extension does not use their service. Maybe if this was some sort of copyright-circumvention software covered by the DMCA I could understand it. But this sounds like an obvious legal bluff, no?
IANAL either, but I think it would be against craigslist terms for me to continue to use their website while “providing” my accessibility extension. So I could publish the extension, but I would have to stop using craigslist. Additionally, the Chrome Web Store developer agreement[1] prohibits publishing an extension that “knowingly violates a third party’s terms of service”, so my guess is that the lawyer would then ask Google to take it down since any user of the extension would be violating the craigslist terms and thus (after the C&D) I would be violating the Chrome Web Store terms.
It’s pretty airtight, so I took my extension down.
I happened to review these terms because I too was sent a letter from Brian Hennessy representing craigslist last Friday regarding a little Chrome extension I wrote a couple years ago[2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131128233421/http://www.craigs...
[2] https://github.com/yonran/craigslist-shortcuts