My Review of Thunderbird as an RSS Client

Summary: Thunderbird is clunky for basic tasks but provides many great advanced features that other RSS clients may not provide. This is likely due to the RSS client part of the application sharing functionality with the e-mail client part; as the e-mail client is well-developed, the RSS client gains its features, including the ability to tag articles; search articles by multiple criteria, including date, author, title, and contents; save searches; and create filters that automatically copy articles that match certain filters to a separate folder. Despite these great features, Thunderbird requires the URL of an RSS feed in order to work, unable to figure out this information from the URL of a webpage that has declared its RSS feed in its metadata; has trouble organizing feeds; and is confusing to set up as an RSS client. If you can get past these hurdles (or they get fixed one day), it's probably one of the best cross-platform desktop RSS clients available currently, specially if you already use Thunderbird for its other functionalities.

Legend

✅ Positive remark.

⚠️ Caveat or issue.

❌ Missing functionality or critical issue.

Default Feeds

Thunderbird doesn't come with any RSS feeds installed by default.

Adding a Feed

⚠️As Thunderbird isn't mainly an RSS client, but an e-mail client, it's rather complicated to add your first feed to it.

• How to Set up Thunderbird as an RSS Reader
• How to Add an RSS Feed to Thunderbird

Thunderbird's first screen helps you set up your e-mail account. We don't need that.

In order to use RSS, first we need to click on the hamburger icon on the window's titlebar, next to the minimize button. Then click on Create Account -> Feed.

Observation: I have absolutely no idea what drives developers to use hamburger buttons like this instead of offering a menubar. In fact, where is the title of the window? I don't even a title. What is going on?!

Revision: oh, it becomes a search box after you create an account.

Observation: the RSS functionality is hidden under the term "Feed." It doesn't even say "RSS feed." If it wasn't for the icon, I mightn't have realized it had this functionality. I assume this is because it also supports atom feeds? I wonder what atom feeds icon looks like.

A dialog window will appear telling you to create an "account," and give it a name. The default name is "Blogs & News Feeds". After you click Next, it tells you to check that you entered the information correctly. Then you click Finish.

After you do this, you get a screen with two panes: on the left your "Blogs & News Feeds" and a "Trash," on the right several options. How do you add a feed then?

❌ There is no "add feed" button. It's not on the toolbar, because there is no toolbar. It's not on the side pane's context menu. It's not in the context menu you get by right clicking "Blogs & News Feeds". It's not in the dropdown menu of the three dots button above the side pane. It's not in the main pane either. There is no "add feed" button.

Revision: it's called "Subscribe..." and is found in the context menu of the root item (and later of other items) in the feeds pane. It performs the same action as pressing the "Manage feed subscriptions" button.

To add an RSS feed in Thunderbird, you need to click Manage feed subscriptions, while is only visible in the main pane if you have "Blogs & News Feeds" selected (or whatever you called your account; I assume in other languages it will have a different default name, which is a terrible idea, by the way, because it's harder to write a tutorial about a thing that can have an arbitrary label).

After you click that button, you get a dialog box where you can manage your feeds.

❌ The dialog has four buttons at the bottom, "Add," "Import", "Export", and "Close". This is confusing. Specially considering that if this was a single action dialog, I would expect the "Add" button to be on the bottom-right, but instead we find the "Import" button around that area, and "Add" is on the opposite side instead. Another issue is that "Add" and "Import" are found at the same vertical level implying that they share the level of hierarchy, which is untrue. Importing and exporting are actions that apply to the whole list, while adding only applies to the add-feed form. The add-feed form has a frame, which could fix the hierarchy issue by grouping the interface elements together, but the "Add" button isn't contained within the frame. After a feed is added, the "Add" button disappears and becomes "Verify" and "Remove" when the feed is selected. The "Import" and "Export" buttons also disappears. I see now that this is a list-detail layout but it's vertical instead of horizontal. This is terrible, don't hide the "Import" and "Export" buttons based on state. These are literally the only buttons to import and export feeds. There's no "export" in the context menus, in the dropdown menu, in the hamburger menu, or in the main pane from before, the only export is only visible in this dialog, when the root item "Blogs & News Feeds" or whatever it's called in your language is selected. In the hamburger menu there's a Tools -> Import option, but that doesn't let you import feeds, only e-mail accounts.

Web (<link>) Support

❌ Thunderbird doesn't support loading an RSS feed from a webpage. This means you won't be able to just give it the URL of the homepage of most websites that support RSS to subscribe to the website. You'll have to figure out what's the URL of the RSS feed specifically, which most websites don't even tell you. It's often hidden in the source code of the webpage.

• How to Find the RSS Feed URL of a Website

Custom Automatic Update Intervals

✅ It's possible to set custom update intervals per feed. From 1 minute to 1000000000000000000000000000 days.

⚠️After adding the maximum value, the number box displays 1.0000000000000002e+27. Why is this field using floating point arithmetic? It should be fixed point. In fact, there are only 31536000 seconds in a year. You could just use a 32 bit unsigned integer for this. Why does it even let me input a number that high? 4294967296 days is millions of years already.

✅ It's possible to make a feed never update automatically.

OPML Support

✅ Thunderbird supports importing and exporting OPML outlines, which can be used to transfer RSS feeds from one RSS client to another. It's hard to find the import and export buttons, but the functionality exists.

Other Observations

You can change a feed's title.

You have the option to show the articles' summaries instead of loading their associated webpage in Thunderbird's built-in web browser.

Viewing Articles

✅ Thunderbird features a built-in web browser that can display the content inside the RSS feed or the webpage content. It doesn't apply any styling by default, it just displays the RSS content as black text in a white box.

⚠️In order to view the content as its associated webpage, you must click More -> Message Body As... -> Web Page. The "More" button that displays this dropdown menu is at the top-right of the content pane. It'd expect that this option would be available in the context menu of the RSS content, but it isn't.

✅ Thunderbird provides a link to the webpage associated with the article above the RSS content. It's labelled "Website:" It's possible to right click on this link to display a context menu to copy it. Clicking on the link opens it in your default web browser.

Layouts

✅ Thunderbird provides three layouts for the whole window and two layouts for the articles list.

⚠️The layouts for the window are accessible through the hamburger menu on the titlebar, in the View -> Layout submenu. The layouts for the articles list are available through a button on the top-right corner of the articles pane. It's not available through context menus.

Observation: I only now realize that there are 4 different buttons in this application that display dropdown menus: one for each pane plus one for the whole window. I wish this was a single menubar instead.

The window views are:

• "Classic View": left pane for feeds, right side with two panes stacked one on top of the other, articles list above.
• "Wide View": bottom pane for the built-in web browser, top pane split into feeds at left and articles at right.
• "Vertical View": the default, with three vertical panes.

The articles list views are Table View and Card View.

Managing Feeds

✅Feeds can be moved into folders by drag and drop.

❌Feeds can't be reordered by drag and drop. Although it seems possible to drag and drop them, it's impossible to just move a feed to a different position. If you have the trash first and then two feeds, and you try to drag the bottom feed to below the trash, you either end up placing it inside the trash or inside the other feed.

I don't understand why you can even place feeds inside other feeds.

The "Manage Feed Subscriptions" dialog doesn't let me reorder the feeds either. There are "folders" where fields are placed, and you can move feeds from one folder to another, but those folders represent where the articles are saved to. This means if you move a feed from one folder to another, the only thing that happens is that the articles are archived to the same folder. It doesn't change the order. You can't even choose where to drop a feed in a folder in relation to one of its child items. You can only place it into the folder and it's sorted automatically.

✅ Feeds can be renamed via the context menu. The keyboard shortcut is F2, which follows convention.

✅ You can fetch a single feed or all feeds manually, although it's not explicit. Clicking on "Get Messages" fetches the currently selected feed. If the root item is selected ("Blogs & News Feeds") then all feeds are fetched. If a folder is selected, all its descendants are fetched.

Folders

✅ Thunderbird supports organizing feeds in a nested folder hierarchy. You can create as many folders and subfolders as you'd like.

You can even create folders inside feeds or place feeds inside other feeds, although this appears to serve no special purpose whatsoever.

Feeds Panel

✅ Feeds have context menus with related actions.

✅Double-clicking expands/collapses folders.

⚠️ Double-clicking a feed doesn't do anything. You also can't rename a feed by clicking on it twice.

✅Supports multiple selection. You can drag and drop multiple selected items to place them into folders.

Managing Articles

✅ Articles can be marked with a "star," i.e. they can be starred.

✅ Articles can be marked as "Read" or "Unread."They arrive as "Unread," becoming "Read" when you click on them.

Articles List

✅ Thunderbird uses colors to indicate the status of an article.

In table view:

✅ Columns can be clicked on to sort the articles.

✅ Columns have context menus. You can hide and show columns using this context menu.

✅ This context menu is actually customized so it doesn't close when you click on it, letting you display or hide multiple columns without having to right click again. This is very nice.

✅There are several columns to display with all sorts of metadata, although some of them are only relevant for e-mail (e.g. correspondent). There are also actions like "delete" and "star" that you can display as columns.

✅There is a column for whether an article was read or not, displaying an icon that is green when it's unread, and fades to grey when it's read.

In card view:

✅ Although there are no columns, you can still sort in card view via the dropdown button on the top-right corner of the pane.

✅You can group articles in both card view and table view by sorting criteria, e.g. you can group-sort by author or tags.

❌ Thunderbird doesn't support thumbnails for articles that contain images.

Categories and Tags

✅ Thunderbird has support for categories and tags. It's a single concept, but it uses both terms through the application.

✅ Thunderbird can automatically categorize articles based on the category provided by the RSS feed's metadata. This setting can be enabled or disabled per feed.

✅ It's possible to set a custom prefix for the categories of articles of an RSS feed per feed. For example, if two different feeds use the term "Reviews" as a category, their articles would both end up in the same category. You might not want that since they could be using the same term for completely different articles, as there is no global standard about what you should name your categories in your blog. You could use the prefix functionality to make the first feed become "feed1-Reviews," and the second category become "feed2-Reviews."

⚠️ There is no preview for what the prefix will look like. For example, if you type just "test" in the prefix box, you might think the result will be "test Previews" separated by a space, but it will be "testPreviews."

✅ You can manually set articles' tags via context menu, including setting a new tag by clicking on a context menu item. There are five default tags that are displayed in the menu for you to select.

✅ Tags have colors. The color of the tags can be changed in the application settings.

⚠️You can't categorize the feeds, except for placing them into folders, however you can mark a feed as "favorite." Favorite feeds appear in a separate pane when you check the item Folder Mode -> Favorite Folders in the dropdown menu button at the top-right corner of the feeds pane.

Automation

✅ You can create filters to automatically save articles to a "folder" (in Thunderbird) by clicking on "Manage message filters" on the main pane while "Blogs & News Feeds" is selected. This folder seems to be a .msf file where Thunderbird normally stores e-mails.

Normally, when you fetch new e-mails, this program would run which would let you sort your e-mails automatically and place copies of e-mails that have important keywords on separate folders. The same program is also run when RSS feeds are fetched.

In fact, you'll see the option "Apply Filter When" "Getting New Mail" in the dialog box. This needs to be enabled in order for the filter to be applied automatically when the RSS is fetched. Otherwise you must manually apply it.

✅ You can save filters of articles by clicking on "Search Messages..." in a feed's context menu, configuring any search criteria you want, and then clicking the "Save as Search Folder" button.

This doesn't seem to copy the articles to a new destination, merely remember what you searched for. This means that the more articles you have, the longer it might take to search them. On modern hardware, I'm not sure if this can become a problem, and I don't know if Thunderbird uses indexes as a countermeasure, but it's one thing to consider.

Search

✅ Thunderbird has great search capabilities. Articles can be searched with a quick filter in the articles pane or by right clicking a feed and clicking "Search Messages..."

Search what?	How?	Supported
Articles	By title	✅ Yes.
Articles	By content	✅ Yes.
Articles	By author	✅ Yes.
Articles	By date	✅ Yes.
Articles	By category	✅ Yes.
Articles	By status	✅ Yes.
Articles	By feed	⚠️ Yes.
Feeds	By title	❌ No.
Feeds	By comment	❌ No.
Snippet	By text	⚠️ Yes.

⚠️ You can search a single feed or a folder that contains multiple feeds. You can also search the "From" field, but this matches the author of the article, which may not be very helpful.

✅You can match multiple criteria at once. You can choose between "all" criteria or "any" criteria. You can have the same filter twice, e.g. "date is before than 2023 + date is after 2022."

⚠️There isn't a way to create "OR" and "AND" operations, e.g. you can't use "From" twice to match one author OR another, AND the title contains a word, in order to search for articles that contain a word that come from either author.

⚠️ Doesn't support Regex.

⚠️ The built-in web browser can search the text content of an article if you press Ctrl+F, however this ability isn't discoverable through the context menu.

Other Observations

⚠️Thunderbird asks for donations a lot compared to other libreware RSS clients.

✅ Very cool name.

Although I haven't personally confirmed this, I've read that you can configure Thunderbird to store messages in the same location if you dual-boot, so it shows the exact same thing no matter if you booted Windows or Linux. It's worth noting that you can end up with corrupted files if your Linux operating system doesn't have good support for the filesystem that Windows uses (NTFS) or vice-versa.