Newsgator Reading Tip for Outlook 2003
As many of you know, I?m a Newsgator fan and have been religiously using it for months now. I want to share a small (and possibly very obvious) tip with you.
In general, there are two ways to read posts downloaded by Newsgator in Outlook. First you can use the home page Newsgator provides to browse through articles that have been downloaded. Second, you can click through the folders created by Newsgator for each RSS feed you subscribe to.
For those running Outlook 2003 though, there is a new feature called search folders. Search folders allow you to define search patterns that analyze items stored by Outlook and then to view the results of that search pattern in one folder. A search folder is very much like bookmarking a Google search, but instead of google you are bookmarking a search shortcut for Outlook.
By default, Outlook 2003 includes an unread mail search folder that shows all mail items that have not been read yet. If you have Newsgator dump posts into your main PST, new posts should already show up in unread mail.
Personally, I have created a separate PST that stores all my retrieved Newsgator posts. PST files are fairly robust, but when I?m downloading anywhere from 100 to 200 new articles a day I don?t want to clog my primary PST I used for business purposes.
The problem with search folders is that they work at the individual PST scope. This means unread posts don?t show up in my unread mail search folder. No problem, you can create a custom search folder in just a few steps.
First, in the Newsgator PST click the Search Folders folder icon. A menu appears that allows you to define a new search:
Click on New Search Folder. The New Search Folder dialog box then appears:
The New Search Folder dialog box defaults to create an Unread email search folder for the current PST. Click the OK button and the new search folder is created.
Let me recommend another suggestion for added convenience. Outlook 2003 also has a feature called Favorite Folders. Favorite folders are a list of shortcuts to the folders you frequently use. To add a new folder to the list of favorites, simply drag and drop a folder into the Favorites list in the Navigation Pane. For me, I can always see how many unread Newsgator items I have:
Now that I have the unread mail search folder set up, I can simply click on it and use the built in Outlook 2003 mail viewing features to skim through my posts:
