Thunderbird is an excellent, free e-mail program that has been available for several months. I thought that I would never find an e-mail program to match Eudora, my previous favorite. However, I recently switched to Thunderbird and am not looking back. I like it better than Eudora in most respects, although not all. I also think it is far better than Outlook, Outlook Express, or any other general-purpose e-mail program that I have found.
Newsletter reader Peter Bradish sent a message, noting that Thunderbird has a built-in RSS newsreader. Of course, this newsletter is available as an RSS feed that anyone can use with Thunderbird to read the articles here. The result is that newsletter articles appear in almost the same manner as e-mail messages: each new article appears in Thunderbird soon after it is published. Everything is automatic, as long as Thunderbird is running on your system; you do not need to launch a web browser and go looking for anything on the web.
Peter wrote:
Hi Dick,
I don't remember if I mentioned it to you before, but the Thunderbird email client can do RSS feeds very easily (it's Mozilla based like Firefox and Nvu).
I don't know if you use Thunderbird or not, or if you do, you may not have configured it for RSS feeds. It's not hard, but if you haven't done it before, it's a little mysterious the first time. Therefore, I'm including below the steps to make an RSS account and add a subscription for your EOGN in case they might come in handy, such as putting them on your blog site for someone to reference.
I saw links for downloading only RSS readers on your blog. Thunderbird wasn't mentioned that I could see.
Use, modify, etc. this as you see fit, if at all. Hope it is of value... Peter Bradish
1. Launch Thunderbird.
2. Click on "Local Folders" or whatever you have for the highest level folders for mail. There may be one labeled for blogs, news, or something else.
Note: Skip steps 3 through 6 if you already have an RSS account. If you don't have one or if you want to make a new one, then don't skip these steps.
Create an RSS account:
3. Click on "Create a new account" in the mail display panel.
4. Click the radio button for "RSS News and Blogs." Click "Next".
5. Give the Account a name such as "News and Blogs." Click "Next".
6. Click "Finish" if you are satisfied; if not, go back and fix things until you are.
Create a subscription for EOGN:
7. Click on "News and Blogs" (or whatever you used to name the RSS feed account).
8. Click on "Manage subscriptions" in the mail display panel.
9. Click on "Add."
10. Enter "http://eogn.typepad.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/index.rdf" (without the quotes) into the "Feed URL:" box.
11. Check or uncheck the "Show the article summary instead of loading the web page" selection box, depending on your preference (unchecked takes longer to download but probably isn't a factor unless you have lots of RSS feeds).
12. Click on "OK," and wait for the feed to be verified and complete downloading the articles.
13. Click "OK" when it's done.
14. Click on "View settings for this account."
15. Check or uncheck selection boxes for how often you want Thunderbird to check for blog posts, whether to do so at startup, and the default for showing article summary instead of web page.
16. Click "OK," and you're done.
17. Go read your EOGN articles.
Thanks for the information, Peter. No "modification" was required.
