Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Lars Keller — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:07:39 GMT

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: http://blog.lars-keller.net/2007/03/05/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. ;-)

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Johan Nordberg — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:08:21 GMT

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.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

JamesNT — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:47:43 GMT

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

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Tim Anderson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:39:00 GMT

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

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Mark — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:15:05 GMT

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.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Mark — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:23:22 GMT

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.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Christopher Stuart — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:21:12 GMT

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

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

shitals — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:52:18 GMT

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.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

jmcbrat — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:40:04 GMT

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?

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

monty — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:08:07 GMT

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.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Lost feed Updates — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:26:45 GMT

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.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

john — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:48:45 GMT

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? :)

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Curt — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:34:46 GMT

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!!

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Raul Lopez Garcia — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:44:52 GMT

I keep getting the following error:

Task 'RSS Feeds' reported error (0xE7240155) : 'Synchronization to RSS Feed:"http://blogs.technet.com/learning_innovation/rss.xml"">http://blogs.technet.com/learning_innovation/rss.xml" has failed. Outlook cannot download the RSS content from http://blogs.technet.com/learning_innovation/rss.xml because of a problem connecting to the server.'

Task 'RSS Feeds' reported error (0xE7240155) : 'Outlook cannot download the RSS content from http://blogs.technet.com/learning_innovation/rss.xml because of a problem connecting to the server. An OLE registration error occurred. The program is not correctly installed. Run Setup again for the program.'

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Michael Ferreira — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:46:59 GMT

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?

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

jamesk — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:07:15 GMT

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?

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Jereck Daren — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:39:19 GMT

I understand why feeds deleted in IE are not deleted from Outlook (and those deleted from Outlook not deleted from IE) but why isn't there an option to turn this feature off ?

Actually I'd prefer having only one feed list for all programs (IE, Outlook, Sidebar Gadget, etc. ..) in my computer.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Jeremy Behmoaras — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:56:44 GMT

I would like to be able to retrieve posts that are older than x number of days. As i just started using outlook 2007, i only have feeds since a few days before i started using the software. How can retrive all those archived posts?

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Jereck — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:43:47 GMT

Jeremy Behmoaras > I don't think you can : feeds are published by their own editors in an XML format (the feed itself).

This XML Document contain only the latest headlines. The exact number of these headlines is choosed by the editor, and, each time a new entry is added in the feed, the oldest one is removed (it's a FIFO behaviour).

Some RSS clients (like Outlook and the Windows RSS Platform) keep the older feed entries in some kind of local store, so you can always see these entries, but these are no longer publish by their original editors.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

vlonsky — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:35:14 GMT

Hi Chris. I really like the Outlook RSS implementation - very convenient. One problem I'm having though and maybe I just set it up wrong.

I created subforlders in Outlook for various groups of feeds (Microsoft Feeds, etc). But while the feeds themselves seem to be present in both IE7 and Outlook 07, the folder strucure isn't synced. So, when I try to subscribe to a feed with IE, I can't simply add it to the appropriate folder that I set up in Outlook. Any thoughts?

What I have to do now is hit the subscribe button in IE, copy the feed address from the address line, switch to Outlook, go to tools/account/rss/new, add it and then change to the folder where I want it to live.

I'm sure I probably just got into a bad habit and maybe set things up wrong, but any thoughts on how I can streamline adding feeds to Outlook from IE? Thanks.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Kevin Moore — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:57:27 GMT

I've used RSS feeds with Outlook 2007 with no problem. I have now loaded up a "corporate image" on a notebook with everything setup for me, kind of. The RSS Feeds folder is still in the list underneath the Exchange mailbox, but none of the feeds are getting updated.

Upon further review, I have found that RSS is no longer setup as an account. I tried going into mail setup to add RSS but there isn't an option for it.

Could the "corporate image" be built without RSS support? Is there anyway to add it?

Thanks!

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Matt Steinberg — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:09:52 GMT

Chris, I use this all the time and really like it. My problem is that one of my RSS feeds is from a SharePoint list and for some reason, Outlooks is marking five items in the list as unread over and over again, even though the feed in IE does not. Any ideas?

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Jason — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:29:33 GMT

I went on vacation last week and when I came back all of my RSS feeds are not being updated. I have spent a considerable amount of time on this and finally found the Send/Receive Group option. When I go to edit my default send/receive group and click on RSS there are only new ones added. It completely removed my regular RSS feeds.

The feeds are still in the Common Feeds List because I can see them in Internet Explorer. They are all being updated and everything looks good there but Outlook seems to have totally dropped them.

The RSS capability seems like such a basic feature to include in Outlook and I am really disappointed that it functions so poorly. I will have to explore other RSS reader options until this product matures.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

joe — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:41:36 GMT

Regarding deleting multiple rss items. Am I missing something? I just press control+A to select all items, then just place them in deleted items.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Daniel — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:22:57 GMT

I'm very frustrated with the Outlook RSS integration. I currently do not receive any updates to any of the RSS feeds to which I am subscribed. Looking at my Groups, all the check marks are set to down load updates, I don't have any synchronization filters set. All in all, this is a bad user experience and it does not do the job it was intended to do - download posts.

I run Outlook 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2003 and manually add the RSS URL's using the "Add a New RSS Feed..." menu item.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Punit — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:54:12 GMT

Hi Chris: RSS feed option does not show in my account settings/ options. When I try to add RSS feed, I get a message stating that administrator has turned off this option. It is my personal computer, and there is no other administrator. I suspect the problem originates during a disk clean up. It was working before that. could you or anyone on this forum advise me what to do? Thanks

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

dariust — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:15:17 GMT

Can someone explain what makes a feed show up as unread? Is it the pubDate or guid or the fact that the content has changed? Thanks.

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

bcb — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:39:24 GMT

I've noticed that Outlook 2007 never updates most of my feeds. I found this post by searching for the problem, and saw that there was an "Update Limit" setting. Since most RSS publishers don't include their update rate (which I discovered is set by a sy namespace setting below), I unchecked this box. But how do I force Outlook to refresh a feed, as even after unchecking this option, the feeds haven't refreshed.

xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"

<sy:updatePeriod>daily</sy:updatePeriod>

<sy:updateFrequency>6</sy:updateFrequency>

<sy:updateBase>2000-01-01T12:00+00:00</sy:updateBase>

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Kinshuk — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:41:30 GMT

I need to read feeds offline quite often, and most of the feeds I read have only minimal data in the feed itself, so I have set up Outlook to download whole article as HTML. But when I am offline, I find that none of teh images have been downloaded with the whole article.

Any suggestions?

Regards.

Kinshuk

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

psesgladden — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:13:32 GMT

Punit, I'm having the same problem with the RSS Feed option tab missing from the Account Settings. Although the RSS Feeds folders is listed in my Mailbox. We're setup a little different because we do have an Exchange server. However I'm not sure that is the problem, because the RSS Feeds works on other computers on the network. I pretty sure it's specific to the computer b/c no matter who logs on to it and setups Outlook 2007 client, we get the same message: administrator has turned off this option.

Did you find a solution?

re: Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Michael — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:46:50 GMT

There seems to be a lot of chatter on the net about RSS feeds in Outlook failing to update. I too have encountered this problem.

I believe my problems may stem from installing Windows XP on another partition and then accessing the Outlook PST file from Outlook 2007 installed on the new partition. When I return to the old partition my existing RSS feeds were no longer updating. Now only RSS feeds created after that date are being processed.

Hope this helps you sort this problem out. Outlook 2007's RSS feature is nice, but the glitches are a real killer.