Add an RSS Feed to Mail

In Leopard — the best version of Mac OS X ever — the versatile Mail program offers a great new feature. Its built-in RSS support lets you read the RSS feeds you subscribe to. That means you can use the same application to read both your mail and your favorite RSS feeds.

Let’s say you visit the Apple Hot News page all the time and would like to be notified when new Hot News articles appear. To do so,

  1. Launch Safari and go to the Hot News page.
  2. Click the RSS icon in the Address Bar and the browser window will change to display Hot News as a series of single-line RSS feeds.
  3. Click the + button at the top of the page as if you were going to create a bookmark for this page.
  1. In the sheet that drops down, click the checkbox next to Mail; then click the Add button.
  2. In the Mailboxes sidebar, Mail automatically creates a new folder to hold all your RSS feeds and puts Apple Hot News to the new folder.

To browse the feeds, simply click on Apple Hot News and Mail displays the headlines of all the articles in the Message pane. Click any of the headlines to have the Hot News article displayed in full. To visit the source of the Hot News article, click the Read more link, and Mail will open (or switch to) Safari and display the page.