Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

RSS Feeds

Mail gets more than mail. It also helps you keep yourself up to date with the world outside—and within your own little corner of it.

For example, the ability to subscribe to those constantly updating news summaries known as RSS feeds has saved a lot of people a lot of time over the years. After all, why waste precious minutes looking for the news when you can make the news find you?

In fact, you don’t even have to waste the seconds it would take to switch from your Inbox to your browser or dedicated RSS program to get a fresh dose of headlines. With Mail, they can appear right in the message window, making it easy to find out which political candidate shot his foot off while it was still in his mouth.

In fact, if you find it too exhausting to click the RSS icon in the mailboxes list, you can choose instead to have all your RSS updates land right in your Inbox along with all your other messages.

Adding RSS Feeds

With just a few clicks, you can bring the news of the world right in with the rest of your mail. Choose File→Add RSS Feeds, and then proceed as shown in Figure 18-18.

Tip

As you turn on the feeds you want to see in Mail, ⌘-click to select a bunch of feeds at once.

Figure 18-18. In the Add RSS Feeds box, you can click to add sites you’ve already subscribed to in Safari. If you don’t already have the feed bookmarked in Safari, click “Specify a custom feed URL” and paste the ...