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Using Outlook to manage and read your RSS feeds has several advantages over a stand-alone aggregator, including the ability to place flags and run rules on any RSS feed to which you subscribe.
Some of you might be wondering what is RSS? Really Simple Syndication (usually referred to as RSS) is a way to get updates to websites sent to you instead of having to go back to the web to see if any changes have been made. In this way, you can keep up-to-date on news and information from many different sources in one place. For example, you could subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog to be notified when we post a new article. You could also subscribe to the MSNBC Top Headlines RSS feed to keep up to date on top news stories. Many companies are starting to use RSS feeds internally to provide their employees with information that doesn’t need to be e-mailed to the entire company.
In the past, people had to use a stand-alone RSS reader such as FeedDemon or an Outlook add-in such as NewsGator to view their RSS feeds. Outlook 2007 now includes a built-in RSS reader, so now you can treat your RSS the way that you treat your mail (using flags, categories, search folders, rules, etc.) without having to use a separate application.
While Outlook is running, it will periodically check the feeds to which you have subscribed and download any new content. Outlook shows an unread count for each feed next to the folder, so you can quickly see if there are new items you haven’t read yet. Because Outlook downloads the RSS feed data from onto your computer, you can access that data even while offline.
Feeds displayed in Outlook look just like mail folders, and show the unread count next to the feed name
You can delete posts as you read them or keep posts of interest long after they have been removed from the feed. You can also categorize posts, move them to a separate folder, or flag them for follow up as you please. For example, if you are subscribed to a feed from your company’s website, you can easily keep posts mentioning your projects and discard those that are of no interest to you. Or you can set up rules that move interesting RSS posts to your Inbox to bring them to your attention.
If you decide that a feed is no longer important, you can remove the feed by deleting the feed’s folder in Outlook. Outlook will stop downloading new content for the feed and move all the existing downloaded posts to Deleted Items.
One of the really great things about RSS in Outlook is how well it integrates with some of the other features in the product. For example, I have several RSS feeds to which I subscribe but am not interested in every post they publish. Instead of scrolling through each feed manually, I use a Search Folder that searches my subscribed feeds for posts with keywords on topics of interest. Michael describes how to setup this type of Search Folder in this OfficeHours article.
Another handy feature is that RSS in Outlook is that the Outlook feed list can be synchronized with the Windows Common Feed List, which is the list of RSS feeds maintained by Internet Explorer 7 (or later). Outlook prompts you to enable this functionally on first startup, and you can later change that decision through Tools, Options.
Feeds from Internet Explorer and other Common Feeds List clients automatically appear in Outlook
When the synchronize option is turned on, any feed added to either IE or Outlook is added to the other automatically. Deleting a feed from Outlook, however, does not delete the feed from IE, so if you have a feed that is publishing a large volume of posts or very large posts that you do not want filling up your mailbox, you can delete the feed from Outlook but still read it in Internet Explorer. This way you can keep your favorite feeds - the feeds that you always want to download – in Outlook and any feeds you just want to check on occasionally in Internet Explorer. Doing so is especially handy for those who have slow internet connections and who want to minimize RSS-related network activity from Outlook.
The option to download enclosures is also very convenient. Some RSS feeds have attachments to their RSS items to supplement the content of the article, like a song file, picture, or Office document. Also, some RSS feeds only post minimal data to their RSS items, such as an article summary and a link to the full article. Outlook makes it possible to download the article text as an attachment to the RSS item for viewing offline. By default, both of these features are turned off, but you may activate either feature by editing a feed’s properties. To edit the properties of a feed, select Tools, then Account Manager from the main Outlook window. Select the RSS Feeds tab to see a list of the RSS Feeds Outlook is downloading for you, and use the Change button to modify a feed’s properties.
You can also choose to download attachments or update an item directly from the RSS post in Outlook. Click the information bar at the top of the item to view the full article in your web browser, or download additional content.
A number of RSS related improvements were made in the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 1 (SP1).
Most notably, the downloading of duplicate items was the number one customer issue with RSS in Outlook 2007 and we have made improvements to drastically reduce the number and frequency of duplicates.
Another common issue that was resolved in SP1 is that certain feeds would show all items were posted on 12/31/2006 or 1/1/2007.
Additionally we made performance improvements when synchronizing RSS items to the Common Feed List managed by Internet Explorer. This will speed up Outlook if you keep your Outlook feeds synchronized to the Common Feed List.
There are certainly lots of different ways you can use RSS inside of Outlook 2007, and I hope you find some of these tips and tricks useful as you explore on your own.
Thanks for taking a look at RSS in Outlook,
Christopher Stuart Outlook Software Design Engineer in Test
Comments: (30) Collapse
Hi,
I've written a little IE Plugin to subscribe per one click to a RSS Feed. This feature I missed in the Windows RSS Plattform.
Here is the download: blog.lars-keller.net/.../IE+AddIn+IEFeedIt+Subscribe+In+Windows+RSS+Platform+Mit+Einem+Klick.aspx
If it is interesting for you I can translate it to English. At the moment the post is in German. ;-)
This was one of the features I really was looking forward to i Office 2007 and I used it alot in the beginning. Now I've switched back to Google Reader because of to things: 1. I kept getting duplicate items. Hopefully this is fixed in SP1. 2. Search folders like Unread email counted unread feed items as well, which made in unusable. Feeds are not email. Period. Email have a much higher priority than feeds and should not be included in the unread email search folder. I ended up with a custom search folder, but it didnt work that well since my custom search folder kept counting unread mail in deleted items, drafts and junk email. If you fix the search folders I would be glad to use Outlook as a rss reader again.
I have been using the RSS features of IE7 for my blogs.msdn tracking needs. I may need to give Outlook a second look. JamesNT
Christopher, Thanks for the interesting article. I have a couple of questions regarding RSS in Outlook 2007. 1. Why doesn't it use the common feed list directly? I'm really bewildered by this. Microsoft introduces common feed engine for Windows ... Microsoft does not use it in Office ? 2. For exchange users, why are RSS subscriptions local rather than server based? If you have, say, a laptop and a desktop which sync to the same Exchange mailbox, the RSS feeds get messed up (in my experience). Now if you had made RSS a feature of Exchange, rather than Outlook, that would be a good reason *not* to use the common feed list. We seem to have the worst of both worlds. Tim
The biggest thing that bugs me about RSS feeds in Outlook is that you can't edit the feed URL without deleting the feed and then recreating it. And then it re-downloads all of the items that it's already got. Oh, and logging into someone else's mailbox once you've set up the RSS feeds in Outlook, downloads all the RSS items into that mailbox. Which is highly annoying if it's an administrative mailbox, or the MD's mailbox. Basically, I think that the RSS implementation in Outlook is only partially thought through and because of this it has some serious flaws in it.
I see 2 problems with RSS feeds in Outlook. 1) You can't edit them and change the URL (I subscribe to a feed that regularly has it's URL changed). In order to do this at present, you have to delete the subscription and then recreate it. And then it downloads everything again. 2) Outlook downloads all the RSS items even if you're logged into someone elses mailbox. I have to regularly check an administration mailbox (and our MD's mailbox). Logging into them results in RSS items from the feeds I'm subscribed to being downloaded into that mailbox. I see these as serious flaws in the RSS features of Outlook.
Johan Nordberg:
We have made significant improvements with regards to RSS in Outlook dealing with duplicates. I would also like to mention that there are some feeds that have a habit of re-posting their posts, effectively creating duplicates on their end. As for your concern when using search folders, you can tell a search folder to ignore RSS posts. To do this, go to the search folder in question and right-click on it. From the right-click menu, select "Customize this search folder...", then from the dialog that appears, select "browse" from "Mail from these folders will be included in this search folder". From there, you can select which folders to aim the search folder at, and exclude the RSS folder. Tim Anderson:
The Common feeds list is what IE (Internet Explorer) uses to check RSS feeds. The separate list for Outlook was introduced so that you could have feeds appearing in Outlook but not in IE and vice versa. One scenario where this might be of good use is if you are subscribed to a feed that makes a lot of very large posts. For performance reasons, you may not want to have this feed downloading to Outlook all the time, but you may still want to look at it occasionally in IE. Also, Outlook saves any RSS feeds to your exchange account, so if you have multiple accounts on multiple machines, RSS feeds will propagate from one account to another. If you did not have the ability to turn that off (which is what relying on the CFL would cause), then any feed you subscribed to on IE on any computer with your account would immediately appear on any other computer without your ability to control it. RSS is propagated on exchange. Why is it that you believe that it is not? Mark:
How many RSS feeds do you subscribe to that frequently change URLs? We weren't really looking at that as a common user scenario when we were working on the feature. As for your administrative mailbox picking up RSS feeds, when you want to log on to that account, just turn off sync to the Common Feeds List and it won't pick up any additional RSS feeds. To do that, please go to tools->Options...->"Other" tab->"Advanced Options..." button. On the dialog that appears, look for "Sync RSS Feeds to the Common Feeds List" and turn it off. That will stop unwanted feeds from appearing in your other accounts. Regards,
-Chris Stuart
I cannot believe this type of lousy, clunky and kludgy feature is actually released in mainstream Office product. I tried to use this feature and I'm so infinitely frustrated that I never ever gonna touch it with 10 foot pole in the future. I trusted the Outlook product team and imported all of my 2500 feeds. Now I'm trying to get read of those feeds and guess what? I'm supposed to delete this one by one whole day long. I'm not sure who even coded this thing and dared to release it out. Seriously. Outlook is frustratingly outdated as it is. You don't have to top this off.
I want to display the latest three rss pages (title as a link) in an email. Basically I want this to function like a google gadget in my email. How do I do this?
I have to agree with Mark. The RSS URL's don't change often but they change enough to make you aware of the lack of feature and piss you off when it does change. For this reason I've dropped outlook as my preferred RSS reader. Also fact that for some reason it seems to just stop getting the feeds even though it's running and patched to the latest level. The fact you can't get to the URL's just compounds the problem of recreating the RSS feed to overcome the bug. Oh well it was a good idea but not executed with user flexibility in mind nor stability. Back to a third party free reader without the issues or limitations. The feeds just stopping downloading/displaying new items seems to be a common thing too.
Lost syncronization. Some of the feeds are no longer updated in Outlook 2007. There is no easy way to fix this without getting duplicat feeds. Why wasn't this fixed? there are loads of us that have this problem.
my #1 complaint for 07 outlook rss is the fact that i cant "merge" rss folders. for example, i want to have all of my gaming rss sites in one folder and all of my tech/work rss in another. I've tried to find away around this (editing the outlook today layout) but i cant find one solid way to fix this. maybe a patch? :)
I have so many feeds hundreds and now I want to delete them. Why can't I just hit CTRL and click each RSS folder and delete them ALL? One by one will take hours!!
I've noticed that one of my RSS feed "disappeared" from the folder list (below RSS Feed). However, when I add it (again) I'm told it's already there. How can I enable the folder to reappear?
i am experiencing failure of Outlook 2007 SP1 to re-check the feed. it checks the feed when created, when the program re-starts and when you manually do a send/receive; but, otherwise does not check the feed during the automatic send/receives. it recognizes the feed's download interval. i have tried this with 4 different rss feeds. same results. any ideas?
Comments: (loading) Collapse