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Hey

Sorry for the Mail centric posts this week. I have a couple of Mail tips and tricks I would like to bash out before I move onto other topics. If you remember the other day I mentioned about controlling your computer with Twitter. This uses an RSS feed to update and run commands. The problem with this is that the RSS default in Mail will only run every 30 minutes. This post will hopefully increase the polling time. I have ran both of the commands shown in this post and the second one does seem to work, although most of my feeds are a little slow to update anyway.

There are two steps to this trick, either the Terminal Preference file change which I don’t think fully works, and the interface change which I think does work. Both of these tricks are courtesy of David from the Twitter to Mail post.

The first step is run the following command in Terminal. This will set the preference file. Set the number at the end of the string to any value you want.The value is in minutes.

defaults write com.apple.mail RSSPollTime 1

Hit enter and restart Mail. You can watch Mail to see if it updates more frequently. I couldn’t see any visible signs.

A way that definitely works is to change the interface. Open up Finder and browse to your Mail application. Right click and show the package contents. Navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj then open RSSPreferences.nib. For this hack, which I forgot to mention, you need to install the XCode package from your install disk.

Once open you should see something similar to the image below.

To access the menu double click on the drop down box in the interface builder and then click on the “Every X Minutes” box. In the Attributes window change the tag to 1 or the amount of minutes you want to update your RSS by. While you are here change the title to better reflect your choice. Save and Close the interface builder and restart Mail.

Hopefully if everything goes to plan your RSS feeds should update more frequently. I have a feeling the first option may be sufficient. If you do please leave a comment. The second option is for more experienced users.