Importing OPML into IE 7 and Live Mail by ThinqLinq

Importing OPML into IE 7 and Live Mail

This has been a week living on the bleeding edge (and it's only Tuesday.) I installed IE7 within a day of it being released to RTM. Additionally, I got an invitation to beta the Windows Live Mail which will be a replacement to Outlook Express. Since I manage my Hotmail account with OE, I thought I would give it a shot as well.

The Live Mail seems to be a bit rough around the edges and there are some things I haven't quite figured out how to tweak yet, but overall it appears to work fine and it imported my email and contacts from OE and messenger as part of the initial startup.

One nice feature inside of Live Mail is the ability to maintain not only my emails and newsgroup subscriptions, but also adds the ability to manage my blog aggregation feeds. I been using Omea Reader from Jetbrains for a while now for newsgroups, MSDN forums (via rss) and other RSS and ATOM feeds. So far I have never had a need to change. Since Live mail includes the same features and includes email management, I'll give it a try for a bit. That is, once I fix the issue of IE 7 being able to import the OPML feed exported by OMEA Reader. This is in fact a simple fix:

To solve the problem, open your exported OPML with notepad. Do a search on the string: Title="
Replace this string with: type="rss" Title="
 

Notice on the first line only use 1 quote and on the replace, use 3.

The source of the "problem" is IE7's more strict implementation of OPML which requires the type attribute. Since ATOM is a kind of rss feed, both can be considered the same in the OPML. The simple search and replace simply adds the type="rss" tag to each outline node. Save the changed file and you should be able to import it into IE7.

Once it is imported into IE7, it will appear in Live Mail if you have that installed. For some reason, the current beta does not allow you to import OPML directly into Live Mail. I would suspect that is a feature which would be relatively easy to add for future builds.

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