Outlook 2007 supports RSS Feeds. But I’m not sure if I like the way it turned out in this release.

First, they are treated like emails, which means you can delete them, and they also show up like emails (author in the first column).

Sure, I can probably modify the view to show the columns in a different order, but why not change it by default the moment you subscribe to a feed? In the case of an email the author is important, in the case of an RSS item, the subject is much more important in my opinion.

Feeds show up as “folders” underneath the RSS Folder. While that is probably due to way Outlook works with the hierarchies in the folder structure, I don’t ‘think’ of a feed as a folder with items in there. For me a feed is a channel with ‘sliding contents’. Posts moving in and moving out when the feed changes. If I would want to store a post for later use I can always copy it out to a new folder. I do realize that’s my way of looking at feeds though. Use patterns probably differ ‘out there’.

By default, the RSS update ‘task’ ends up in the default profile to refresh when you press F9. The first thing I did was to remove the RSS update from that profile and create a new profile.

There are bugs in there too(it’s a beta after all): I frequently ended up with multiple entries for the same post in a Feed ‘folder’.

If future beta releases provide me with a more ‘standard’ RSS functionality (with standard I mean, like what the RSS readers out there today do) I might consider switching. I like the idea of having RSS feeds in my email tool. Until that time, RSS Bandit is for me the RSS Reader of choice.

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