Outlook doesn’t have any deterministic update options, which just seems very lame. There are options to use the feeds own update characteristic (TTL expirations), but all of the feeds I’m subscribed to don’t seem to be picked up by Outlook even though most publish this feedvalue.

And why, oh why is there no option ANYWHERE to 'Update my feeds now'? C'mon this is an obvious choice if you don't have automatic updating on. What are those guys doing on that team doing? Valium? <s> Somebody's asleep...

The whole RSS reading experience in Outlook is pretty weak when it comes right down to it. The folder manipulation is not adequate since it treats the RSS feeds like a mail folder. For example, you can’t just click on a feed and configure it – you have to go through the buried RSS options hidden 5 levels down in the Options dialog.

There are also no options that I can find that let me configure how many posts to keep. I have a couple of very active feeds I’m subscribed to (WebLogs@asp.net for example, that throw out 50 posts a day and that folder gets huge in a hurry).  So the folder along with my PST file goes through the roof until I at some point go through and clean up each folder individually.

Finally there’s no support for authentication on feeds, which is just pathetic. How hard would it have been to add support for authentication options to a feed? I have a couple of internal feeds on my site that provider server status and error reports off an authenticated feed and that simply doesn’t work with Outlook.

All in all that’s a shitty implementation that’s just half assed. It seems very little thought was given to RSS as a feature other than – make sure it runs in Outlook.

To be fair it Microsoft aren’t the only ones who are getting this wrong – I used Newsgator some time ago and it had nearly the same exact issues. I’m not sure if this is because of the Outlook object model or because of bad design, but for Microsoft at least even the latter is hardly an excuse given they own the product and can make changes to accommodate with what I think is an important part of the ‘messaging’ architecture. Instead, just another mediocre implementation.

I guess it’s back to FeedDemon for me.

Oh, one more thing that bugs me with RSS on Vista/IE 7 too. If you’re running an HTTP tool like Fiddler you’ll be very annoyed to find that the IE RSS Platform very frequently pings feeds and updates them. If you’re in the middle of an HTTP debugging session IE will constantly fire RSS ping updates into the middle of the session which is very annoying. IE too doesn’t seem to have options to control how often updates are requested. It sure seems like a waste of resources to be going out and pinging my 50+ feeds every five minutes when once maybe twice a day is what would be optimal.