Managing the Windows Common Feed List

With Windows Vista and IE7, Microsoft introduced the Windows Common Feed List.  This is a great facility that lets you share your RSS feeds between IE and Outlook (and any other Windows application that you want to use to access it).

While I really like the capability, I’ve been frustrated that my feeds list is getting pretty chock-a-block with things in which I am no longer interested.  For the life of me, I couldn’t find out how to manage the feed list in bulk.  (It’s easy to remove feeds one at a time in both Outlook and IE.)  I hadn’t spent the time to track down how to do this, but finally today I found this post out there on the Windows Observer blog that gave me the answers.

The feed items are stored in the folder C:Users[Username]AppDataLocalMicrosoftFeeds.  They are much like shortcuts in that they are small files that contain the details of the feeds you’ve subscribed to.  From this folder, you can delete any feeds that you’d like and they will be gone forever, both in Outlook and IE.  (Don’t delete the file FeedsStore.feedsdb-ms, as this seems to be the database that contains information about each feed.)  You can avoid conflicts when you delete feeds if you close Outlook and IE first.

One note: Depending on how you added feeds to Outlook in the first place, you may still need to delete the RSS folders there manually.