Subscribing to RSS in Thunderbird

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Thunderbird can be used to access websites that make content available through RSS feeds. Thunderbird lets you view RSS content in a way that is very similar to reading email: the RSS feeds that you subscribe to will be listed in the folders pane, the "headlines" will be displayed in the message-list pane, and when you click on a title the article content will be displayed in the message preview pane.

Creating an RSS Account

Before you can subscribe to any RSS feeds, you first need to create an RSS account. To do so, open Thunderbird and follow these instructions:

1. Go to File > New > Account. Alternatively, you can go to Edit > Account Settings, and click on the Add Account button.

2. In the dialog box that pops up, select RSS News & Blogs and press the Next button.

3. Enter an account name, press the Next button, and finally press the Finish button. This new account will now appear in the folders pane in the main Thunderbird window.

Subscribing to RSS feeds

You subscribe to a feed through the RSS Subscriptions dialog shown above, which can be accessed in any of these three ways:

1. Right-click on the account name in the folders pane and select "Manage Subscriptions".

2. Click on the account name in the folders pane, and then click on the Manage Subscriptions link in the main Thunderbird window shown below.

3. Go to Tools > Account Settings, click on the account name in the left-hand pane, and then click the Manage Subscriptions button.

Once you've brought up the RSS Subscriptions dialog, all you need to do to subscribe to an RSS feed is click the Add button, enter the URL for the feed into the box, and click OK.

After the feed is verified, it will appear in the RSS Subscriptions dialog and in the folders pane under the account.

In the same way, you can add more feeds under a single RSS account. If you subscribe to numerous feeds, you may wish to create more than one RSS News & Blogs account, each with multiple subscribed feeds.

Other RSS settings

For each RSS account, the following basic settings are available through Tools > Account Settings > [Account Name]. You can:

1. Check for new articles every ___ minutes
2. Check for new articles at startup
3. By default, show the article summary instead of loading the web page (for feeds that make a summary available).

For each subscribed RSS feed:

• To have the articles for a feed stored in the same folder as the articles for another feed:
  *open the RSS Subscriptions dialog, select the feed you want to change, click the Edit button, and then use the drop-down list to change the destination folder.
• To rename a feed:
  *right-click on the folder in the folders pane and select Rename Folder (or select the folder and go File > Rename Folder), and then type in the new name.
• To change the default character encoding:
  *right-click the folder in the folders pane (or select the folder and go Edit > Folder Properties), and change the encoding as desired.

Using Saved Search Folders with RSS accounts

You can create Saved Search folders for your RSS accounts and feeds. For example, if you subscribe to Yahoo! News but you're only interested in reading the Los Angeles Times stories included among all the Yahoo! News articles, you can create a Saved Search Folder to display only those articles. This is especially convenient when the feed provides a lot of articles but you are only interested in a specific subset of them.