Have you ever wanted to read RSS feeds in Outlook 2000, XP, 2003 or Outlook Express? By default, only Office 2007 has a built-in feed reader that you can use to access and organize your favorite RSS subscriptions. So if you’re looking for a free utility that can help you access RSS feeds from within Outlook, check out the RSS Popper.

RSS Popper has a lot of really useful features, such as the ability to support a feed that requires authentication and the ability to allow Internet Explorer to adds feeds to Outlook directly. You can also synchronize with your favorite online RSS aggregators such as Bloglines and NewsGator. This is really convenient if you already have all of your feeds stored there.

Once you have the plugin installed, you’ll see a new folder called RSS in the All Mail Folder. You can access the folder quickly by pressing CTRL + Y and then hitting R followed by Enter.

outlook rss feeds

RSS Popper supports all of the major feed types including RSS, Atom and RDF. Another really cool feature is the ability to import and export OPML files. This means that if you have your current subscriptions stored in Google Reader, you can export them out and into RSS Popper!

RSS Popper even supports Podcast feeds! You can also quickly and easily transfer all of your RSS Popper settings between computers, if need be.

rss popper
(Synchronization with online RSS aggregator)

Overall it’s a very nice app for those of us still running older versions of Office. There is also another option for reading RSS in Outlook, which may even be better than the Office 2007 built-in reader called IntraVnews.

This program is also free and has a bunch of features also such as the ability to post to your blog from within Microsoft Outlook and the ability to search for feeds in a large online database. You can also assign feeds to groups and import feeds from online aggregators.

intravnews

So those are all of your options for getting RSS into Outlook! Hope it helps!