Macos – How to edit RSS feed address/URL in Apple Mail

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How can I easily edit / modify / change the address of an RSS feed URL / address in Apple Mail? I am on OS X 10.6.8, Mail 4.5.

I found information on how to use terminal to export the list of feeds, but is there a way to modify one? Or do I have to export the list to give me a record of what's there, delete the feed that needs changing, and then create a new feed, copy in the URL from the export, make the changes to it, and save it?

It seems like a very long winded process for something I thought would be super simple. Sometimes I wonder how Apple gets these simple things so horribly wrong.

Best Answer

I have written up a blog entry on that here.

If you are using OS X 10.6.x

(Snow Leopard, and perhaps earlier versions too)

Open the Terminal application. Simply type “Terminal” into Spotlight quick search (Command-SPACE usually pulls up spotlight quick search). Not familiar with Terminal? Well, to be blunt, Terminal is one part of OSX the average user should never have to deal with at any time. Sadly, Apple doens’t always get its concepts straight, and we have to venture into things like Terminal. It’s basically a doorway into the underlaying UNIX framework of OSX. It’s like lifting the hood on your car to tinker with the motor.

Terminal looks like this:

In terminal type or copy/paste this command, and hit Return key:

for i in ~/Library/Mail/RSS/*/Info.plist; do defaults read "${i%.plist}" RSSFeedURLString; done

It will produce a nice list of the RSS feed URLs.

You can then copy and paste each of these into an application of your choice.

ALTERNATIVELY:

You can also paste this into terminal

pubsub --client com.apple.mail list

This will produce a list with RSS feed name and its URL. You will probably need to expand the Terminal window across the screen to prevent Terminal from line-wrapping the long feed details onto the next line (which makes them harder to read).

You can also use this in Terminal:

pubsub --client com.apple.mail list | cut -f3 | sed -ne '3,$p'

This will generate a list of the URLs like the first command I shared above.

If you are using OSX 10.7.x (Lion)

Follow the above instructions regarding Terminal, but paste in this command:

IFS=$'\n';for i in $(find ~/Library/Mail/V2/RSS/ -name "Info.plist");do grep "http://" $i | sed "s/.*\(http[^<]*\).*/\1/" >> ~/Desktop/Mail\ Feeds.txt;done

That should do the trick.

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