Outlook 2007’s little surprise: it fills your mailbox up by itself

Jarrod Spiga:

Mr Maher, have you been blindly clicking on OK buttons again???

After you install and run Outlook 2007, you are prompted for many things. If this is the first Office 2007 applet that you start, you're asked if you want to send MS info relating to problems that office apps may encounter and wether you want solutions to said issues, wether you want to use the online help, and wether you want to install the Microsoft Update add-on (which allows you to automatically update Office 2007).

After you go through these selections, you're also asked if you want to subscribe to Microsoft's RSS feeds. I get the feeling you clicked the "Yes" button here.

Sadly, MS Office is still very US-centric (Vista is too - I have my language settings all set to English - Australian, yet I still see "Personize your Desktop" after I right-click on it).

William:

Aha, thanks Jarrod. Thinking back now, I don't think I did the installation myself. Nice excuse? And you're probably right, it might have been something agreed to along the way. Still, it will be interesting to see whether Outlook users start clogging up their servers with RSS, whether they're deliberately subscribed to or not. Thanks for the feedback.

Wes:

It would have been good if some of these dialog boxes defaulted to 'No' and then a user would just press enter to not subscribe for example. Unfortunately they default to 'Yes' and a lot of users don't bother reading them because there are so many of them and they just press OK or enter and then before they know it they have subscribed to many things that they do not need at all.

David Flynn:

This is why the last place I want RSS feeds are in Outlook.

Yes, the idea makes perfect sense. Why not have RSS items lob into the same program that handles your emails, and the program in which you spend so much of your day? (I've got Outlook and Word almost always open, and use Outlook extensively for email, scheduling, contacts, tasks etc). Why not have them dropped into their own little folders, always close at hand and searchable? They're like email, just another source of info, and many of us who use Outlook all the time would welcome the chance to leverage (!) its capabilities.

But having tried all manner of RSS add-ons for Outlook, and initially been enthusiastic about Outlook 2007 including RSS, I've since gone 180 degrees on the idea.

You think your inbox suffers from email overload? Just try subscribing to a few dozen RSS feeds. (Well, try stopping at even a dozen, because the idea of having these feeds is so seductive that you soon end up with way too many.)

What happens is that you have all these additional things to check through, which of course you rarely get down to doing, so the RSS folders bloat and bloat and you just get more and more behind. Then you either blow away everything without reading it, or waste time (which you never really had in the beginning going through the feed folder.

Nope, for me personally, the place for RSS feeds is in my Desktop Sidebar (www.desktopsidebar.com), which lets me keep an eye on them through the day (even when doing something else). I've got a huge amount of feeds in rotation through this, but I get to see 'em all. Anything of interest I can click on, be taken to the Web site to read and if I feel it'll be useful later, I bookmark the page or drag a shortcut of it into a project folder. It's not perfect but I stay in control far more than if I shoveled those feeds into Outlook.

 

Dan Warne:

Personally, I use R-mail.org which sends me RSS items as emails. That way, they appear in my chronological list of email and I can read them as I go through my email. I can imagine that would be some people's worst nightmare but it works really well for me because I can't avoid reading them -- whereas an RSS program or folder in an email program means I have to actively go and read them (not really living up to the ideal of 'news that comes to you'.) 

FostWare:

Personally, I use Outlook for personal RSS feeds and iGoogle for public feeds

William:

I agree, RSS is great, but for now it's place is on the desktop, not with the rest of my email. If there's a way the server space issues can be solved then maybe, but for now I might have to turn this feature off in Outlook.

Jarrod Spiga:

The other solution to this kind of problem is the use of the Auto-Archive feature of Outlook.

AA is also switched on by default, but generally only purges data that is more than x days old once you allow AA to archiove content in a given folder (I can't remember how long the period is off the top of my head. It's adequate for email but ludicrously long for RSS feeds).

If you navigate to Tools > Options > Other > AutoArchive, ensure that AA is run every day or two. You may want to remove the ticks in the "Delete Expired Items (e-mail folders only)" and "Archive or delete old items" check boxes to prevent AA from messing with your mail folders. Do the OK button shuffle until you're back in Outlook.

Then, right-click on each RSS folder that you have and select Properties > AutoArchive. Click on the "Archive this folder using these settings" radio button, set AA to clean out items older than, say 7 days and then select the "Permanently delete old items" radio button. You'll need to do this paragraph's worth of instructions of each RSS folder - settings are not inherited to sub folders. Of course, you can customise settings to your hearts content.

Viola - RSS feed management, and you keep your mailbox down to a manageable size while keeping yoru RSS folders containing recent material.