Reading RSS feeds while offline

It’s one of those things; you’re travelling for a while and you’re done reading all your emails already. It’s a great time to catch up with some of your RSS feeds but most of them only contain a spoiler and not the full item. As you are offline you cannot read the rest.
Or can you?

Well, at that time; no, you cannot as you are offline. But you can prepare yourself before going away and set Outlook to download the full items for the “spoiler-feed” as attachments.

Download entire feed
Tools-> Account Settings…-> tab RSS Feeds-> double click on the feed-> enable the option:
”Download the full article as an .html attachment to each item”
When a new item comes in, the full item will be attached as a htm-file.

Download a single item
Select the item and click on the Infobar above the text of the item and choose “Download/Update all content”.

Note 1: Not all pictures might be downloaded and the formatting could be a bit off from the original website, but you will at least get the full text of the item.

Note 2: Windows XP doesn’t contain a HTML previewer for attachments so you’ll have to open the htm-attachment by double clicking it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 allow you to open the attachment in the Reading Pane so you won’t have to leave Outlook.

Note 3: You might want to cleanup/delete the feed items after you have read them as the attachments could make your mailbox (or pst-file) grow quite large quite fast. AutoArchive could help you with this as well or simply disable the download option when you’re on-line again and can read the full text directly.