RSS via Outlook

This is a guest post by Perry Reed, Twitterer, and LJ and Spaces blogger.

Call me old-fashioned.   While I think all this Web 2.0 (or 2.5 or whatever number you kids are up to now) is great and all, I still prefer email as my primary tool for getting things done.  In particular, I use Outlook because of its rich features and its ability to easily tie together my email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and other information.  I use several plug-ins that help me with all of that, too.  I still subscribe to several email lists for content on all sorts of content.  So I use email for more than just personal information; it’s a source of incoming content for me.

But I also read a lot of blogs, which are slightly less old fashioned than email, I suppose, and I am lazy enough that RSS appeal to me greatly.  Why should I have to navigate to 50 different websites when I can have the content delivered to me, much like my email lists?  But that’s not the end of my laziness.  Why should I have to use a different application for email and RSS feeds, too?

Here’s my thinking:  Blog entries are usually bits of discrete content, just like emails.  So why not treat both as messages and deal with them in the same way?  I had tried a couple of different Outlook plug-ins back when I was running Outlook 2003, including an old version of Newsgator, that would let me read RSS feed entries as emails.  With Outlook 2007, that feature is built-in, and works pretty darn well.  I can read the entries just like emails, and I can forward them or reply back to the blog author (most of whom are people I know and are therefore in my Outlook contacts) right there.  Very slick!  One issue I have found with the built-in Outlook RSS feed service is that it is not able to handle feeds that require digest authentication (that’s where you pass your login credentials to the site).  Unfortunately, a lot of my friends use “friends-only” locked LiveJournal accounts which require that digest authentication.

The solution has turned out to be the latest beta version of Newsgator Inbox, about which I first read here when Sarah blogged it.  Now I should mention that the version you would download from their site has a bug that prevents the digest authentication from working.  But when I and a few others posted about the problem on their forums, they quickly (I mean really quickly, like in one day) put up an interim test build that resolved the problem.  Nice customer service!

So now, I have all of my feeds and various email lists all in one place, along with my personal correspondence, of course.  But it gets better.

Not only do I use Outlook, but I pay for a hosted Microsoft Exchange email account.  So all of my email is really sitting on the Exchange server.  And so are my RSS feeds because I’ve configured Outlook to store my feeds in folders that are on the server.  All I have to do is keep Outlook running on my desktop PC so that the feeds are pulled in periodically and synced up to the server.  Maybe someday Microsoft will add RSS feeds as a server-based Exchange plug-in…

So now I can access all of my email and all of my RSS feeds from my desktop PC, my Tablet PC, my Windows Mobile phone, or any other computer with a web browser via Outlook Web Access (OWA).  And it’s all synced automatically, so any email or RSS message I read or delete is marked as read or deleted on all of my devices everywhere.   And, since it’s all on the server, it’s all backed up for me, too.

Sometimes being old fashioned and lazy works out really well.

This was a guest post by Perry Reed, Twitterer, and LJ and Spaces blogger.