Giving Up FeedDemon for Outlook-based RSS Reader

I love Feeddemon. It’s arguably the best stand-alone RSS reader out there. Pretty much everything the program’s author has written has been great (I have copies of Homesite and Topstyle as well, both his creations and both wonderful pieces of software).

FeedDemon just worked away, downloading RSS feeds like it was supposed to, hidden away in my system tray. The problem is that I generally work and schedule my daily life out of Outlook and posted entries to this site based on what was e-mailed to me, and didn’t have time to go through all my RSS feeds. So I wanted to get an RSS reader that integrated into Outlook so I could just check my feeds out of there. The company that now supports FeedDemon also sells NewsGator Inbox, which does exactly what I need to do (and had used before back in the day). It would sync with FeedDemon, assuming I actually ever opened up again. The problem was that I didn’t have $30 to spend on it (if they gave a discount to folks who already own two of their products, I’m all ears).

Some Googling dug up Attensa For Outlook, which, so far, is doing all I need it to do. The best part is it’s free.

Now I just need to catch up on my feeds, as I’m horribly behind. But having it in a place I’m already working on a daily basis will make it far easier.

Update: Since it was asked, why didn’t I use Thunderbird, which has built-in RSS support? My Outlook agenda versus Thunderbird is mostly for a few reasons:

1) Far superior label/filtering/rules/flagging abilities which makes it far easier for me to keep track of the 13 accounts I check.

2) Powerful calendar integration

3) Many powerful 3rd party add-ons because of it’s stupidly powerful API.

4) It totally blew up Thunderbird when it tried to import my accounts, email, and settings out of Outlook.

It actually has nothing to with Windows and syncing, though I do tend to favor it in that regard, too, as I need to be able to support it on the desktops where I work.

I honestly considered moving to Thunderbird and have been playing with it for the last few days. but after dealing with it, playing with it, trying to make it work how I wanted to, I had to go back to Outlook. I’ll certainly consider it in the future if there are significant upgrades in that regard, but there are just some times where open source != better.