
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.