NewsGator Inbox – Subscription Management Tool

One of the tools that is seemingly unique to NewsGator Inbox is the Subscription Management Tool. This is turned on by going into the NewsGator Inbox Options (which opens a new window) and choosing the button marked General Options. This will also open a new window. Towards the bottom of this new window you will see the sentence “Ask me to mark older posts as read when I have this many unread posts:” which is followed by a box with a 15 and up and down arrows. Select the check box next to the sentence in order to activate this function. Then enter the number of posts that you want to have as unread to trigger the tool to activate. You can choose any number up to 10,000. As I have stated in previous post I am easily overwhelmed by RSS readers and the sheer volume of information that they bring to your attention. With that in mind, I have set the number of unread posts to 100.

So once the tool is triggered it will ask you if you want to run the tool. It will give you 30 seconds to activate it or cancel and then it will automatically run. It gives you a total number of unread posts that exist across all of your subscriptions. I twill also give you some options. The first (or default) is “all posts more than 24 hours old”, the second is “older than 48 hours”, then “older than 5 days old” and finally “all posts”. Select “Ok” and it will confirm that you want to run the tool, select “OK” again and it will do all the work. It does not delete all the posts so if you want you can go into the feed folder in the folder tree and you can see all of the posts. For instance I just ran the tool and before hand there were 3 unread Dilberts. Now they are all clear and marked as read, however when I opened the feed folder I can still view and read each of the Dilberts that I missed.

The one thing that I noticed is that it will lock up Outlook and make it unavailable while it runs. Since it does lock up Outlook, before it runs it will confirm that you want to run it. The good news is I have had upwards of 500 unread posts and the longest I have timed it was 24 seconds to run. Even with that, I have to say I really like this tool. I like that it reduces the number of unread posts and thus reduces the number of posts that I feel I have to read. I know I am weird, it’s ok.