[car1son]

I have a lot of RSS feeds in Mail, but I'm such a shallow person I rarely look deeper than the headlines. And when I do, it's to read text.
It seems Mail automatically downloads any attachments from the RSS feed, which apparently can include mp3 audio and mpeg video files. This is a great waste of bandwidth. I'll never use one of these attachments through Mail. (If I expected or wanted a podcast, I'd have put the feed in iTunes instead.)

I can't find an option to not download attachments automatically. Anyone know a way to stop it?

I might just delete any RSS feeds that include attachments, if I knew which they were. At the moment, I haven't even figured out which feeds are causing the downloads, since the URLs they all seem to go to 3rd-party sites for multimedia distribution rather than the site of the feed. For example, you'd think if Mail was downloading http://podcast.ulcc...._CONFERENCE.mp3 this morning, I could find an RSS entry from today that included it; but I can't find any obvious match. Or if Mail wants to download http://daily.greenci...-Four-Lions.mp3 ... I don't have an RSS (or iTunes) feed with greencine.com (and after listening to 10 seconds of that mp3 in my browser, I'm not going to.) I have no idea why Mail wants to download this stuff, but I'd like to stop it.

This post has been edited by car1son: 28 July 2010 - 12:44 PM

[Dolphbucs]

I know this isn't really what you are asking about, but have you ever considered making Safari your newsreader? Seems its display features more suit the way you read RSS.

[car1son]

I was never very comfortable with Safari's RSS display. (Nor Opera's, which is my usual browser.) Mail has a very compact list of subjects, and I can organize the feeds into folders and sub-folders (just like mail) and I can view lists of posts by any folder I care to. I find it compact and functional.

Your comment did lead me to look at Safari again, tho. And that was helpful. That first attachment I mentioned that Mail was downloading just reeked of "BBC", but I didn't have a BBC RSS feed... in Mail. Turns out I had some old, long-forgotten RSS feeds in Safari, including the BBC, from some previous time I tried out Safari as my RSS reader. Ditching them seems to have eliminated Mail's immediate download urges. (Apparently if Mail is your RSS reader, it handles everything for PubSubAgent, not just its own feeds. Live 'n Learn.) So, thanks for the idea.

[Dolphbucs]

Glad I was able to .... help ? LOL