Tip: Find Your Deleted RSS Feeds In Mountain Lion’s Mail.app

If you updated to Mountain Lion, and you used Mail.app as your default RSS reader, you’re probably having a bad time right about now, wondering exactly what Apple did with all of your RSS feeds. Long story short, Apple discontinued its RSS functionality in Safari and Mail, so your feeds are dead. Forever.

But, if you want to collect your feeds so you can include them in some new fancy RSS reader (we recommend a Reeder and Google Reader combo), here’s a quick tip on how you can extract your feeds from Mail, and get a list of URLs you can include in your new application of choice.

Finding your missing Mail.app RSS feeds

  1. Open the Terminal
  2. Copy And Paste Into Terminal: cd ~/Library/Mail/V2/RSS/
  3. Copy and Paste Into Terminal : find . -name "Info.plist" -exec grep -A 1 Feed {} \; | grep string | sed 's/^[^>]*>//' | sed 's/]*>$//'
  4. Your RSS feeds should show up in a list in the Terminal window.

Now all you have to do is copy and paste those RSS feeds directly into your new RSS application.

It really sucks that Apple suddenly pulled RSS support from Safari and Mail without giving us tools to export our feeds in some OPML or CSV kind of file, but thankfully this tip helps alleviate that pain a little bit. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.