How to use Thunderbird to get RSS feeds?
Here’s How to Set Mozilla Thunderbird as Your Primary RSS Feed Reader!
This is not common but Thunderbird is also an RSS client. It can get your RSS feeds or also called syndication from the website that you have subscribed to.
Thunderbird checks the location for the RSS feed and then download the content locally. These downloaded contents are working same way as emails (move to the folders, delete, backup, etc.).
In this post, we will learn how we can use Thunderbird as an RSS reader.
How to use Thunderbird to get RSS feeds
First, let’s take a quick look at what RSS even is.
It’s a type of a web feed that allows to access the new content on the subscribed websites. Websites syndicate their content using RSS feeds and using the RSS address, you can get those updates to your reader, which is in this Thunderbird.
To start, simply go to the website that you want to subscribe the RSS feed to. Look for the RSS icon (which looks like the flipped wi-fi icon in orange) or simply the ‘RSS‘ text. Right click on it and select “Copy Link Address” or “Copy Link Location“.
Now, in Thunderbird, you first need to create the feed account. It can simply be done by going to ‘File’ –> New –> Feed Account. Type the name of the feed account you want (for example, “Technology RSS Feed” to get all your updates from various tech related websites), click “Next” and “Finish“.
Now, on the left folder pane in Thunderbird, click on your feed account name, click “Manage Subscriptions“, and in “Feed URL” box, paste the RSS link address you copied above. Click on “Add“. Thunderbird will start downloading the current articles from that RSS feed and will create a new folder for them. You can also drag and drop the link to your Feed folder to subscribe to any other RSS feed.
RSS Feeds in Mozilla Thunderbird
Much of the RSS feed content behaves exactly like your emails.
Right click on any RSS account name and select “Get Messages” to start downloading all the newest content from the subscribed feeds.
You can also choose to either view each feed as the summary of the content or the whole published article from the website. This can set either from the “Feed Subscription” dialog or from the “View” options at the top. Go to View –> Feed Message body as and select either ‘default’ format or choose manually whether to show the feeds as summary or the complete web-page.
Lastly, you can arrange these feeds into folders and sub-folders. And almost all the operations that can be performed to the emails. And the email folders can also be performed to RSS Feeds.
Make sure that in Feed subscription box, you have specified the interval within which Thunderbird checks for new articles. This shouldn’t be too often as it takes unnecessary bandwidth. Depending on the subject or website you have subscribed to and how often do you need the updates, set the interval to check the feed in Thunderbird as per your needs.