Outlook as Your RSS Reader

Very few people use Outlook Express for more than email. Below are steps and tips on setting up the Outlook Express Newsreader for viewing and posting to the Microsoft newsgroups.

1. Open Outlook Express or if you have Outlook configured, open Outlook.
2. From Tools menu, select Accounts.
3. Click the Add button and select News.
4. This will launch the Internet Connection Wizard.
5. Type the name you want to appear in the "From" column in the Display field.
6. Type your email address, this can be any email address, but I suggest creating an anonymous email account just for newsgroup posting.
7. Enter msnews.microsoft.com for the NNTP server. Since the Microsoft public newsgroups do not require a password, leave the checkbox "my newserver requires me to log on" unchecked.
8. In the Newsgroup Subscriptions dialog box, type microsoft.public.windowsxp. to display all Windows XP newsgroups. Click the newsgroups you're interested in, then click Subscribe.
9. When you have subscribed to the desired newsgroups, click OK
10. From OE Tools> Options> Read> Set the number of headers to retrieve to 1000. Uncheck the checkbox to download all the messages in a newsgroup. (recommended, but takes a considerable amount of time. OE Newsreader will give a much higher estimate of the posts to download. Estimate is over a million headers for the general group, but actual number is around 90 to 100 thousand.) The XP newsgroups have a very high volume and average posts in some groups exceed 1000 posts per day, using the default 300 headers to download would give only a fraction of the posts and replies to the newsgroups.
11. From View> Current View select Show All Messages.
12. From View> Sort By select Sent
13. Optionally From View> Layout> Preview Pane, select open preview pane, then 'below messages' or 'beside messages' and finally Show preview pane header. This option allows you to see messages as you select them.
14. Use Help for more tips on configuring OE for newsgroups.