Escaping Mac Mail RSS

Don't get me wrong, the Mac Mail RSS reader is pretty good. If you've just got the one computer, and don't have any desire to read your RSS feeds when you're away from home, then it's an excellent choice. It's shameful, however, that MobileMe – Apple's service for syncing your data between Mac computers – doesn't even try to sync your RSS feeds between Mail clients.

This lack of ability to keep the RSS feeds in my Mail client on my desktop and my laptop in sync (let alone on my iPad or iPhone) has led me to start looking for a replacement RSS reader. As disappointing as the lack of sync is, I quickly discovered the even more shocking reality that there's not even a way to export my RSS feeds from Mail. Go, look ... you won't find anything... I'll wait.

As it happens, there's this standard, which is useful for moving RSS feed information around, called OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), which is a subset of XML (eXtensible Markup Language). I'm not a big fan of XML but there are times when it's useful, and in this case several major RSS readers have implemented an OPML import/export so that you can move your RSS feeds around. It would be really handy if Apple implemented this as well.

Unfortunately, Apple's oversights get worse. Not only can you not sync RSS feeds between computers, or export your RSS feeds, you can't even view the URL of your RSS feeds within Mail so that you could manually copy them to another device or program. Go Apple!

This only leaves one option: manually digging through the files that Mail saves out to keep track of your feeds. This is a task that is beyond the average home computer user, which effectively means that most Mac users who start using Mac Mail as their RSS reader are stuck.

Fortunately, I'm not the average home computer user, and I know where to find these files that Apple writes, and I know how to read them .. so I could go in and cut and paste all those URLs into another reader. But I'm too lazy for that, so I wrote a program to do it for me. This wasn't quite as easy as I expected, since reading in the XML plist files turned out to be a bit of a trick. As much as I don't like XML, trying to describe how I hate XML plist (the format Mail uses for these files) would completely derail this post – Apple really screwed the pooch on that one.

Eventually I gave up on the program being super-portable, and just used someone else's library to read in the plist files. I had been hoping that I could post a script here that anyone could save on their Mac and run to generate an OPML file, but the plist debacle meant that other stuff would need to be installed. Oh well.

In the end I got my OPML file, and I've imported it into Google Reader. Several of the iPad RSS readers will import their feeds from Google, which works well enough.

I'm posting my script below, free to anyone for personal use. In order to make it work you'll need to first install two libraries on your system.

Making it Go

In "Terminal" (which you can find in Applications -> Utilities), type the following two commands:

gem install builder
gem install plist

Once you've installed builder and plist, click on this link. It will download an archive file that contains the script.  When that's done, in your Downloads window double-click on the "MacRSStoOPML.tar.gz" entry; that will decompress the archive and show you a new Finder window with the archive you downloaded and the script that was in it.  Double-click on "MacRSStoOPML" (it'll have a grey box-like icon) to run it.  And you're done!  You should now have a file called "opml.xml" on your Desktop, which lists all of the RSS feeds you were reading in Mail.

Happy reading!