To add an RSS feed to Thunderbird, follow the following steps:
1: create a "Feeds" "account" in Thunderbird where RSS feeds articles will be stored. How to do this has been covered in a previous tutorial:
In this tutorial, we'll use the default name for the "Feeds" account, which is Blogs & News Feeds.
2: select "Blogs & News Feeds" on the side pane. The main pane will display a few actions related to it.
3: click on "Manage feed subscriptions." A dialog window will appear.
Alternatively: you can right click on "Blogs & News Feeds" and click on "Subscribe..." in its context menu.
4: select "Blogs & News Feeds" in the upper pane of the dialog window.
Observation: although this might not be necessary the first time you do this, since there will be only "Blogs & News Feeds" to select, when you add your second feed you must select "Blogs & News Feeds" first. If an RSS feed is selected instead, the following steps will end up editing the properties of the selected feed instead of adding a new one.
5: enter the RSS feed URL in the "Feed URL" field.
As of writing: this URL must be the actual URL of the XML file describing the RSS feed. You can't add the homepage of a website that supports RSS. You can't add https://blog.thunderbird.net/ for example. You must add https://blog.thunderbird.net/feed/, which is the RSS feed URL of that particular website.
See [How to Find the RSS Feed URL of a Website] for detalis.
Observation: if you try to add a URL of a webpage, Thunderbird will say "Verifying the feed..." and then display an error that reads "The Feed URL is not a valid feed." Thunderbird shows a link at the right of this message that reads "Check validation and retrieve a valid url." This sounds like Thunderbird has the functionality to validate and figure out where the RSS feed is from a webpage, but it does not. The link opens a new tab inside Thunderbird that goes to W3's validator [example], but the validator displays the message "It looks like this is a web page, not a feed. I looked for a feed associated with this page, but couldn't find one. Please enter the address of your feed to validate." This means that this link to W3's validator is worthless, because Thunderbird's blog was made with WordPress, which powers a major part of the web. WordPress clearly declares where the RSS feed URLs are in the HTML code, and even Vivaldi can find them in Thunderbird's blog. In other words, most websites that use WordPress wouldn't have their RSS feeds findable by this tool. I'm not sure what kind of feeds it can find. From the looks of it, it's only meant to validate URLs that actually go to the RSS XML files, and not supposed to find anything from a web page at all.
6: change the update frequency to something sensible. A good number is once per day. The default is once per 100 minutes which may be too frequent for many websites.
For reference, Thunderbird's blog RSS feed has 50 items, and the last one is from 10 months ago. This means you could set the frequency to once per month and you still probably wouldn't miss anything. Even if you want to be relatively up to date to the news, once per day should be enough.
7: click the "Add" button. The feed will be added to Thunderbird.
Optional: it seems Thunderbird doesn't provide a way to view all your articles from all your feeds in one place, but it will show all articles of all feeds inside of a folder when the folder is selected. You might want to create a folder and place your feeds inside of it.
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