I made the mistake of importing my OPML file (with about 150 feeds) into Internet Explorer 7 because I wanted to read my RSS feeds using Outlook 2007. That didn’t turn out so well, because Outlook 2007 has next to no tools for managing feeds – it looks like a last-minute add-on, lacking even basic features such as marking feed item as being read when you exit the feed. So I decided to switch back to using Feeddemon. Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 have a symbiotic relationship to feed items – meaning that whatever you import into IE7’s RSS feed items will also show up in Outlook 2007. As Shakespeare would say, here’s the rub: there’s no way to select all the feed items in IE7. If you want delete them, you have to right-click on each item and delete each one. I thought there had to be a faster way, so after some research I discovered that the IE7 feed items are located here (you’ll need to turn on hidden files to see them):
C:\Users\Jason Dunn\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds
Now here’s the ugly part: Outlook 2007 creates a one-time, not a permanent link, with the RSS items in IE7. Meaning that even though I deleted all of the RSS items from IE7’s data store, they all still existed in Outlook 2007. 🙁 The slightly better news is that pressing the Delete and Yes key in rapid succession allowed me to get through them all pretty quickly. The ultra-ugly news was that even after deleting all the feeds, I still had 8500+ unread mail items in Outlook – and the only way to delete them was to delete them in groups, feed by feed. What a completely screwed up scenario this is…I hope I don’t have to repeat all these steps with Outlook on my main workstation (I did this all on my laptop).
Jason – I’m glad that I’m not the only person who thinks that the Outlook 2007 integration with the RSS feedstore sux to the absolute maximum. The few times I tried it I have ended up with duplicate items, outlook not being able to send/receive and as you quite rightly points out it doesn’t keep the read items in sync with the core feed store.
After you pointed out where the feeds are stored on the drive I bothered to go and look at them and of course they are a propietary format – why, why, why? I don’t get MS they had a perfect opportunity to use their own products (or even just XML) and yet they pick the worse (and in this day in age unforgivable) option of creating their own format. For example, like Media Centre, they could have used SQL Server CE as the backing db for tracking feed information. This would mean that as a developer we don’t need to go a rubbish native interface, instead we could use the managed wrapper for SQL CE to access the data (and extend with our own metadata)!