The Mozilla Foundation released new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird today, and both include support for RSS feeds. In Firefox it comes in the form of “Live Bookmarks”, which you can read about here.
I couldn’t find a similar page for Thunderbird, so here’s how it works: In Thunderbird, you can add a new type of account, called appropriately “RSS & Blogs”.
You manage your subscriptions in your account settings, just like it was an email or newsgroup account:
Once your set up, your news flows in just like email:
Pretty damn cool, I think– all it needs is subscription import and export. Go get Thunderbird
