Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Remove RSS feeds from Outlook

I ran into an issue where I was getting an error on send/receive: RSS feeds error "Object cannot be found." The offending feed had been removed from Outlook, but was somehow causing an issue.

To resolve these problems, you can backup your feeds, remove all of them, and then only add back what you want.

First back up your feeds. If you don’t want any of them, you don’t need to do this. To backup feeds, open Outlook and go to File > Import/Export > Export RSS Feeds to an OPML file.

Next, remove all feeds from Outlook and IE. Note that you've only backed up the Outlook feeds, so you'll have to make a note of the IE ones you want to get back (e.g., the URL to the feed).

1. To remove feeds from Outlook, go to Tools > Account Settings > RSS Feeds.
2. To remove feeds from IE (Tools > Toolbars > Favorites. then switch to the “Feeds” tab and remove the feeds you don’t want.
3. You may want to delete the folders that contain RSS posts that were already downloaded by Outlook, to do this, find the “RSS Feeds” folder in Outlook and delete the sub-folders you don’t want.

Once you have done this, you can add your feeds back by opening the OutlookRSSFeeds.opml file and taking out the ones you don’t need. Be sure you create a copy of your OPML backup files in case you make an error.

Sample Exported Feeds File:

<?xml version="1.0"?><opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>OPML exported from Outlook</title> <dateCreated>Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:41:17 -0300</dateCreated> <dateModified>Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:41:17 -0300</dateModified> </head> <body> <outline text="Metalogix Blog" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://blog.metalogix.net/?feed=rss2"/> <outline text="MSNBC.com: Top msnbc.com headlines" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=44406"/> </body></opml>

I only want the Metalogix feed, so I removed the other one (which was causing the error) and import teh file back into Outlook (File > Import/Export). This is what my altered OPML file looked like:

<?xml version="1.0"?><opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>OPML exported from Outlook</title> <dateCreated>Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:41:17 -0300</dateCreated> <dateModified>Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:41:17 -0300</dateModified> </head> <body> <outline text="Metalogix Blog" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://blog.metalogix.net/?feed=rss2"/> </body></opml>