Google News Feed URL fails in Thunderbird

 Sun, 04 Dec 2022 07:27 UTC

Google News Feed URL fails in Thunderbird
Image: CC BY 4.0 by cybrkyd


Thunderbird’s RSS does not accept Google News Feed URLs. Normally, to get a Google News category or search as a RSS feed requires a minor change to the URL:

Original URL:

https://news.google.com/search?q=privacy&hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en

Add /rss after news.google.com. The URL therefore becomes:

https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=privacy&hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en

It is a perfectly valid RSS feed as confirmed when validated by W3.org. Evolution and a host of other RSS readers will accept this URL as a valid RSS feed. Thunderbird, however, rejects it, reporting it as either invalid or not authorised. Let’s fix that pronto.

Subscribe to Google News RSS in Thunderbird

To fetch Google News feeds as RSS in Thunderbird, the following workaround can be used.

Step one

Create a new file and call it rss.sh. Add the Google News URLs and fetch them using curl. In the example provided below, the three feeds will be saved to directory /Downloads/rss-feeds as named XML files.

#!/bin/sh

curl -g --compressed "https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=privacy&hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en" -o /home/cybrkyd/Downloads/rss-feeds/privacy.xml

curl -g --compressed "https://news.google.com/rss/topics/CAAqKggKIiRDQkFTRlFvSUwyMHZNRGRqTVhZU0JXVnVMVWRDR2dKSFFpZ0FQAQ?hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en" -o /home/cybrkyd/Downloads/rss-feeds/technology.xml

curl -g --compressed "https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=open%20source&hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB%3Aen" -o /home/cybrkyd/Downloads/rss-feeds/opensource.xml

Save the file rss.sh and make it executable.

$ chmod 744 rss.sh

Step two

Setup a cron job to fetch the RSS updates. In the following example, cron will run rss.sh every hour at 5 minutes past:

5 */1 * * * /home/cybrkyd/Documents/shell-scripts/rss.sh

Step three

In Thunderbird, subscribe to the local XML files. Keeping with the examples above, the feed URLs are added to Thunderbird as follows:

file:///home/cybrkyd/Downloads/rss-feeds/privacy.xml

file:///home/cybrkyd/Downloads/rss-feeds/technology.xml

file:///home/cybrkyd/Downloads/rss-feeds/opensource.xml

Subscribing to Google News RSS in Thunderbird is now possible.