Feeds

Feeds

Ctrl+9. A built-in RSS and Atom reader: your subscriptions down the left, the articles in the middle, the article itself on the right.

This is the one module the reference does not have. It keeps subscriptions as folders under Mail and nothing else — which is fine for five feeds and no use for fifty. A reader with fifty wants their own headings, their own counts and a list built for articles rather than for correspondence, so Feeds is a module here, with a store of its own.

The navigation pane

Today	Everything that arrived today, across every feed.
Unread	Everything unread, oldest first.
Read Later	What you set aside.
Boards	Your own collections — an article saved to a board stays there after it is read.
Categories	Feeds you grouped yourself.
Feeds	One entry a subscription, with its unread count.

The five things people look for

Subscribing. Add a Feed takes a URL — the feed's own, or the page's, in which case the page is read for the feed it advertises. Import and Export take OPML, so a reader arriving from another application brings their list with them.

Reading. Space moves through an article and then to the next unread one, which is how a feed reader is actually used. Next Unread does the same from the ribbon. Marking as read happens on selection; Mark All as Read clears a feed.

The whole article. Most feeds send a teaser and no picture. Reading fetches the publisher's page and shows the article in place — the text and the images — rather than sending you to a browser. Open Original opens the page in your browser when you want the real thing.

Keeping something. Read Later sets an article aside. Save to Board files it on a board of your own, which is where things go that you will want again after they have been read.

Turning the noise down. Mute Filters hide articles matching words you name, per feed or across all of them — the way a feed with one topic you do not care about is made bearable without unsubscribing. Pause Feed stops fetching one without losing it.

Newsletters

Mail that is a newsletter can be moved here rather than living in your inbox: the Newsletters button lists what looks like one and moves the sender's mail into Feeds, where it reads as articles. One-click unsubscribe works from either side.

How it looks

The navigation pane takes the theme's colours; the article list and the article itself stay light in every theme. That is deliberate — an article is a page from somebody else's site, and a page is white.

Where things are

• How often it fetches: the Reading dialog on the ribbon, or per feed in Feed Settings.
• Which store: its own, ~/.local/share/mailbox/feeds.db — beside the accounts directory rather than in it, so nothing that opens every file in there as a mail account opens this one.
• Unsubscribing: Unsubscribe on the feed. The articles go with it.