Now how is that for a title :- )    

Alan asked a good question earlier today about the Unread Mail Search Folder and the fact that standard also the unread RSS Feeds show up here :

“… is there a way to have the unread count in the Outlook inbox not include the RSS feeds? I have hundreds of RSS feeds that I can’t look at each day, and it drives the unread count for the inbox up, which is not what I think the feature should do.”

My response was not the right one (I am getting old …) so I dug a little deeper.

As you can see in the picture below, there are 2 different Unread Mail counts for my Mailbox :

1. There’s Unread Mail in my Inbox (15)
2. There’s Unread Mail in my Mailbox (3203), which includes the RSS Feeds folder

The Unread Mail for the Mailbox is handled by something called a Search Folder, which is a fully customisable feature; you can change the current one and can create new ones …

If you right-click the Unread Mail Search Folder (in the Favorite Folders list on top) you see the different options for this Folder :

If you then choose ‘Customize This Search Folder’ you get all of the customisation options (this seems obvious huh)

In the screenshot above you see that the tickbox in front of ‘Mailbox – Peter de Haas’ is ticked; meaning that all unread mail in this Mailbox (Inbox, RSS Feeds and potentially other Inboxes) is counted and shown in the Search results.

So when I only want to show Unread Mail for my Inbox, this should be the only box ticked :

The endresult is as expected; the Unread Mail Search Folder now only shows the 15 unread mails in my inbox :

Which reminds me, I have 3203 unread RSS Feeds :- )

Microsoft Office Outlook has a build-in RSS Feed Reader.

Basically you have an extra folder in your mail file for RSS feeds. Up ‘till now I’ve been a very satisfied user of RSS Bandit, but now I have the new machine I am going all the way ; -).

What I really likes about RSS Bandit by the way was the integration with WBloggar as the editor; you’d just right-click a post in RSS Bandit and it would provide option to ‘reply’ to the post in WBloggar. I miss that in the current setup to be honest, so it’s a bit more cut and paste …

Another thing which I don’t like about the current implementation of RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007 is that the import functions of OMPL seems to be missing the categorization of my feeds. This means I am still in the process of reorganizing and moving my feeds. The upside of this is that I have the chance to clean the up as well.

What I do like is using Word 2007. The ease of use, basically because I’ve worked with it for many years, is great. The blogging view now suports the basic features, nothing fancy but it serves my needs. The only thing missing is categories, so I still have to do an extra step in the Typepad native editor to do that. I hope this feature will be put in once Office 2007 goes RTM …

Anyway RSS Feeds in Outlook ..

This screenshot shows you my Outlook and you can see the RSS Feeds folder :

Reading feeds is just like reading email, from the same application in which a spend quite some time every day. With the preview screen (introduced already in Outlook 2003) I can read the post and if I wish, I can also click the option to view the post in my default browser :

When I double-click the post it opens a new view in which I have all the options to for example categorise, flag (turn it into an action), or email the post :

Another nice option is the “Share This Feed” option which allows the receiver of the mail to subscribe directly to the feed :

Through this I noticed something is still wrong with my blog setup. I always thought my Feedburner was the only option to subscribe (and the desired one). Now it seems that also my native (atom.xml) feed is active. So when people subscribe through a reader that ‘fetches’ the feed from my main page than it ignores the Feedburner one.

Reason why I don’t like it is that it screws up my statistics …