WARNING!: The way Thunderbird works is a bit different from most RSS clients, so instead of showing the quickest and most intuitive way to add an RSS feed, which will cause you a lot of trouble and confusion later, we're going to do it in a bit more convoluted way, and then I'll explain why we're doing it this way at the bottom of the article.
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: right click on "Blogs & News Feeds" to open its context menu.
3: click on "New Folder...." This will open a dialog for you to type the name of the folder.
4: give the folder the name of the RSS feed that you want to subscribe to.
5: click "Create Folder."
6: right click on the folder to open its context menu.
7: select "Subscribe...." A dialog box will appear with the folder selected and a field for you to input an RSS feed's URL.
8: type the URL of the RSS feed you want to subscribe to.
9: select an update frequency.
10: click "Add."
A progress bar will appear showing that the Thunderbird is downloading the RSS feed and saving its entries in your PC.
Note: if you get the error "The Feed URL is not a valid feed," see [How to Fix: "The Feed URL is not a valid feed" (Thunderbird Error)].
11: after it completes, click the "Close" button. The feed will have been added and you'll start receiving new articles from the RSS feed automatically.
Explanation
When you add an RSS feed to an RSS client, it will download a single XML file containing multiple entries of the RSS feed and store each entry separately somehow in your PC. This works just like an e-mail client. The e-mail client receives e-mail messages and stores them in your PC.
Generally, the way RSS clients do this is that they manage everything automatically. They will automatically create a folder in your PC to store the files of the RSS feed when you add the RSS feed. And they will automatically delete these files if you remove the RSS feed from the RSS client.
Thunderbird, on the other hand, does it a bit differently.
When you create a "folder" in Thunderbird, you aren't creating a virtual folder that only exists for organization purposes (which is how most RSS clients work), you're creating an ACTUAL folder in your filesystem where messages retrieved will be stored.
When you click "Subscribe...," you're telling Thunderbird to fetch messages from an RSS feed and store it in a folder. Thunderbird doesn't really know the difference between e-mail messages and RSS entries. It stores both practically in the same format, which is why all of its e-mail functionality also works with RSS entries.
The Problem
By itself, the way Thunderbird works isn't really confusing, if you were told about it beforehand. In my case, because I only write tutorials, I don't read them, I had to learn this the hard way.
You see, the way I did this the first time was by trying to find an "Add Feed" button somewhere. After searching everywhere I could, the only place I could find was the "Subscribe..." context menu option of the root item and the "Managed Feed Subscriptions" button that opens the same dialog.
When that dialog is opened and the root item is selected, Thunderbird will automatically create the folder and automatically add the subscription, which is great because now you don't have to create the folder and the subscription separately. However, this only works for the root item.
Subfolders Don't Work?!
If you have a subfolder and you try to add an RSS subscription the same way it worked with the root item, what's going to happen is completely unexpected. Instead of creating a subfolder and adding a subscription to the subfolder automatically, Thunderbird will only create the subscription and attach it to the currently selected folder.
This means a single folder is going to have 2 subscriptions.
On one hand, this ability is interesting because you can store entries from 2 RSS feeds in the same physical location. I have no idea why would you want this, but it's possible in Thunderbird even though it's not something you can manually manage in other RSS clients.
On the other hand, it's not something you want most of the time, because if you do this, the entries in the folder become "mixed." Some entries will have come from one RSS feed, some entries will have come from another.
But the weirdest thing is how Thunderbird's interface works.
If a folder only has one RSS feed attached to it, the RSS feed isn't displayed. So it will look like you only have one item on the side pane when you have two. When you add a second RSS feed, you'll have a folder with one name, with an RSS feed of same name, and another RSS feed inside of it.
Tip
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 super-folder where you place all your feeds so you can quickly view everything.
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