Manage Email Signatures centrally from your Desktop - For All Users

Jesper Frier

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 information from many different sources in one place.

For example, you could subscribe to the generel RSS feed for this forum to be notified on support questions, new templates, new articles, new downloads etc.

We provide several other RSS feeds in this forum with specific content.

You need a RSS reader to view RSS feeds. There are many available for free. Personally I use both Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 2007 (see Common Feeds List why I use two ... Wink

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Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007
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.

Treat RSS just like E-mail
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 one of the feeds mentioned above, you can easily keep posts you find interesting 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 our 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.

Common Feeds List
Using RSS in Outlook your feed list can be synchronized with the Windows Common Feed List, which is the list of RSS feeds maintained by Internet Explorer 7. Outlook prompts you to enable this functionally on first startup, and you can later change that decision through Tools, Options.

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.

Downloading Full Articles
Our RSS feeds only post 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 right click and download the content directly from the RSS post in Outlook.