Re: When RSS Is So Cool, Why Is Apple Mail So Lame?

placidwater — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:14:31 -0000

You make a great point that if you subscribe to a lot of feeds, the method described here is the only way to go!

However, that is beside the point of this post. While also making it easy to import hundreds of feeds, the hack provided in this post (and originally from theappleblog.com) also enables Mail to read some feeds that it otherwise would not be able to load.

Here's the deal: Apple Mail and Safari "autoload" RSS feeds by parsing the URL for the location of an XML document. This means that if someone created a funky URL to point to their RSS feed (for example, used mod-rewrite to redirect feed requests), then Apple Mail would think the feed URL was invalid and would give you an error message. I'm pretty sure this isn't a typical problem (and clearly one you did not run across while individually loading each of your 32 feeds), but one example is the feed for Nature Neuroscience (URL: http://www.nature.com/neuro/current_issue/rss/). It doesn't reference an xml document and so you need to first load it in Firefox, then import it to Safari, and finally import it into Apple Mail.

BTW, if you are happy with getting your RSS feeds when you launch Safari, that's fabulous. This post was for the rest of us who want RSS delivered in email form and used Apple Mail as their email client.

Re: When RSS Is So Cool, Why Is Apple Mail So Lame?

Kiwiiano — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:06:22 -0000

You need to make it clear that Mail's RSS 'problem' is for folk taking 100's of feeds. I've got a total of 32 in Safari, with a dozen of the important ones accessed via Mail*. It works just fine for me.

(*although I'm not quite sure why. Just because it's there, I suppose. Functionally there's no difference and I could access them just as readily if they were in the same folder in Safari's Bookmark bar.)

rtfa.net - Latest Comments in When RSS Is So Cool, Why Is Apple Mail So Lame?

Re: When RSS Is So Cool, Why Is Apple Mail So Lame?

Re: When RSS Is So Cool, Why Is Apple Mail So Lame?