Read news in Thunderbird with RSS feeds

An RSS subscription is a way of keeping up to date with the latest stories and articles posted to websites, a little like having an inbox dedicated to a particular website.

The first task is to create an account in Thunderbird to keep the RSS messages. Click on the Tools menu and then on Accounts Settings. Click on the Add Account on the left of the screen. Select RSS News and Blogs and click on Next. Leave the name as it is and click on Next. You could set up several accounts for different topics if you wanted. Click on Next and then Finish.

The settings for the account can be found by clicking on its entry on the left. You can see here that it is set to check for updates every 100 minutes. Click on OK when you are happy with the settings.

The RSS account has now been added in the left-hand side of Thunderbird. Click on it once to see the main page and then on Manage Subscriptions.

A small window will appear and this is where you can add feeds. Click on the Add button and then enter the address of the website. Don't worry if this is a little complicated because there is a simpler way to do it. For this example we used the address of the Computeractive news feed. Thunderbird checks the feed and then downloads all of the articles. Click on the red close button to close this window.

Click on the small + symbol next to News & Blogs to expand it and then left-click on Computeractive news to see all the articles in the feed.

To read more of an article, click on it once and it will be loaded just like an email.

It can be quite hard to remember the address. The best way to simplify this is to use the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Firefox looks for RSS feeds when it loads a page and displays an RSS logo at the right of the address bar if it finds one.

Left-click on this icon to see a preview of the feed and to see a list of options of how to read the feed. Firefox has its own RSS reader called Live B ookmarks, but we think that it is easier to read RSS feeds in Thunderbird. Left-click on the dropdown menu and then select Mozilla Thunderbird. Click in the box below 'Always use Mozilla Thunderbird to subscribe to feeds' to skip this step in the future. Click on the Subscribe Now button.