Export RSS feeds from Apple Mail

I’ve been moving my feeds from Apple Mail and Eventbox into a dedicated feed reader, to make it easier to manage and filter them. This was all going well until I tried to get my feeds out of Mail and discovered no OPML import or export ability (apparently, if you are a mac user, you won’t want this basic capability).

Thankfully, with the help of a very simple workout in Terminal (or an apple script) and a quick trip to the internet, this can all be fixed.Exporting the list

First of all, you have to get your feeds out of Mail. This can be done using a simple piece of code in Terminal:

http://www.mactipper.com/2008/04/leopard-only-export-mails-rss-feeds.html (or)
http://nasvel.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/export-rss-feeds-from-mac-mail/

The MacTipper link also includes a small applescript, which, when run, will export your list of feeds to a file or clipboard. Either is fine.

Making it OPML

You’ll still need this list in OPML format if you wish to bring it into another feed reader however, and for this there Peter Unold’s Plain Text to OPML Generator. Paste your list in here and then save the output back to a text file called feeds.opml using a text editor, somewhere you can find it easily.

It’s then a simple case of importing the OPML file into your feed reader (mine is now Vienna) of choice using its built in import capability.