Outlook 2007 RSS Date Problem

I upgraded from Eudora to Outlook 2007 earlier this year, and for the most part I've been very happy with it. I use it for email of course, but also for tasks/to-do list information, contacts/address book, and also as my RSS reader for blogs and other feeds. It is this last area where I was having one problem with Outlook 2007, as any blog feeds that were from Blogger were listing all entries as having a date of 12/31/2006. The problem is that Outlook has problems supporting the Atom feed format, as opposed to say the RSS2 feed format.

Many other folks have the same problem of course, and it took a lot of research at discussion forums and so on to find a workaround that we can use -- until MSFT fixes this aspect of Outlook 2007.

Many people suggested appending ?alt=rss to the end of the URL of your atom feed, and that this would then produce an RSS2 feed that Outlook 2007 could work with properly. But that doesn't work. What you need to do is append that parameter to the end of the URL of the feed as it is stored at the Blogger.com site -- not at your blog's location. This is an address that looks something like this:

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/23832556/posts/default

That is the one for my blog, Philosopher Stone. Yours would be identical, except it would have a different number string there in the middle. How can you get this URL? One way is to look for it in the metadata at the beginning of your feed. If you are using IE7, you can do this by browsing your feed, right-clicking, and choosing View Source. Then look around for a URL just like above, except with different numbers. There you have it!

Use that in Outlook 2007, except append ?alt=rss to the end of it, like this:

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/23832556/posts/default?alt=rss

That should do it! Your date display problem will now be solved!