Reading RSS feeds while offline
It's one of those things; you're travelling for a while and you're done reading all your emails already.
It's a great time to catch up with some of your RSS feeds but most of them only contain a spoiler and not the full item. As you are offline you cannot read the rest.
Or can you?
Well, at that time; No, you cannot as you are offline. But you can prepare yourself before going away and set Outlook to download the full items for the “spoiler-feed” as attachments.
Download entire feed
You can configure an RSS feed to download full items in the following way;
- Outlook 2007
Tools-> Account Settings…-> tab RSS Feeds-> double click on the feed-> enable the option: ”Download the full article as an .html attachment to each item” - Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013
File-> Account Settings-> Account Settings…-> tab RSS Feeds-> double click on the feed-> enable the option: ”Download the full article as an .html attachment to each item”
When a new item comes in, the full item will be attached as a htm-file.
Download a single item
You can also select an item and choose to only download the complete article for that item (or update it if you already downloaded it);
- Outlook 2007
Click on the Infobar above the text of the item and choose “Download/Update all content”. - Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013
On the Home tab, there is an RSS option group. Here click on “Download Content” and choose “Download article”.
Notes about using this method
- Not all pictures might be downloaded and the formatting could be a bit off from the original website, but you will at least get the full text of the item.
- Windows XP doesn’t contain a HTML previewer for attachments so you’ll have to open the htm-attachment by double clicking it. Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 allow you to open the attachment in the Reading Pane so you won’t have to leave Outlook.
- You might want to cleanup/delete the feed items after you have read them as the attachments could make your mailbox (or pst-file) grow quite large quite fast. AutoArchive could help you with this as well or simply disable the download option when you’re on-line again and can read the full text directly.
