Feed subscriptions in Outlook and Outlook Express

If you spend a lot of time in Outlook (or Outlook Express) on Windows, you may want to read RSS feeds there instead of an external feed reader. Outlook 2003 and older versions do not offer native RSS support as far as I can tell, however there are plug-ins available to enable RSS subscriptions in Outlook. The particular one I tried is called RSS Popper, which is freeware and works in Outlook and Outlook Express, 2003/XP/2000. After installation RSS feeds are displayed under a folder called RSS in the “All Mail Folders” pane on the left-side navigation. The keyboard shortcuts are to hit “Ctrl-Y” to bring up the Go To Folder menu, then hit “R” for RSS and enter. RSS Popper supports authentication for RSS feeds, useful when a feed is tailored to a particular user for example. If the feed you add requires a username and password, you can put this into the settings menu found at top left by default in Outlook. RSS Popper supports RSS, Atom and RDF feeds.

RSS Popper has some other interesting features, like allowing Internet Explorer to automatically add feeds to Outlook, or synchronization with Bloglines and other rss aggregators, though I didn’t test these features.

If you have another way to add RSS feeds to Outlook, or want to share how you this tool might be useful for you, please do so in the comments.