Why Are RSS Feeds Slow To Update in Outlook
I’ve had a miserable experience with RSS feeds in Outlook. There are feeds (suc as those from teh Stack Overflow Trilogy sites) that I just know should update at least every few minutes, yet Outlook often takes an hour or more to show any changes. Today after an email exchange with Jeff Atwood (@CodingHorror) I think I’ve finally figured out what is going on.
Right, here’s what I think is happening. When a feed is added to Outlook, the default settings (which are hidden under the ‘Advanced’ button) are to use the publisher update recommendations.The publisher of the feed can specify a Time To Live setting, this is the time that content is expected to remain cached before it is refreshed. Outlook interprets this setting as the minimum update interval. Outlook will not check a feed for new content more often than this minimum interval.
The <ttl> element is optional and some feeds (such as those from teh Stack Trilogy) don’t contain it. When Outlook doesn’t find a <ttl>, everything defaults to 60 minutes. So in this default situation, Outlook will check for updates at most once per hour.
To avoid this default one-hour situation, it is necessary to instruct Outlook to ignore the publisher’s recommendations (even though the publisher hasn’t made any explicit recommendations, the absence of a recommendation implies a 60-minute update cycle by default). To do this, when adding the feed to Outlook, click the Advanced button and uncheck the box outlined in red in the screen shot above. Note the yellow highlighted text indicates that the publisher has not specified an update policy.
Unticking that box does allow faster updates, but there is another wrinkle. We;ve removed the minimum interval, but the default settings for the Send & Receive Groups is 30 minutes. So even when the minimum TTL is lowered to 5 minutes, Outlook still will not even try to check more often than every 30 minutes; this is the default setting of the default Send & Receive Group. So, to get full control, it is necessary to uncheck the “Use publisher’s recommendation” box, AND to create a custom Send & Receive group (or modify the settings of the default group). I don’t recommend modifying the default group.
So, create a new Send & Receive group and in its properties, select the RSS feeds that you want to update at the higher rate.
The screen shot above shows my Server Fault RSS feed being prepared for updates every 5 minutes.