RSS in Outlook 2007, Pt. II

March 12, 2007

It looks like my initial optimism for RSS feeds in Outlook 2007 may have been a bit premature. I noticed last week that a few of my feeds weren’t updating (I actually noticed this with a few rarely updated feeds even longer ago, but when digg has no new stories, you know something is wrong). Send and receive didn’t report any errors, and it wasn’t until I looked at the account settings that I saw that some of my feeds weren’t listed anymore. Why, I have no idea. The mailbox folder (with the old news items) still existed, and I never saw any warnings or errors to indicate there might be a problem.

I could live with Outlook telling me it couldn’t update the feed, or the account settings were corrupted (or whatever actually happened, I’m just guessing), but when it quietly stops updating the feed, that makes me want to give it up altogether.

Update: I should have made it clear that this is under Windows XP. I recently installed Vista, which seems to have it’s own system-wide way of managing RSS feeds. Hopefully this will work a little better.

Marc Charbonneau is a mobile software engineer in Portland, OR. Want to reply to this article? Get in touch on Twitter @mbcharbonneau.