My mom, studying to be a librarian, asked me about this article on RSS for Non-Techie Librarians. So I put together a few screenshots illustrating how to set up Mozilla Thunderbird as an RSS reader. I figure since I’ve gone to all the trouble I may as well make it public.

First you need to “Create a new account”. There are several ways to find this button: one is shown here.

The “Account Wizard” asks what type of account you want: in this case we want “RSS News & Blogs”. Click “Next”.

You need to name the account, although you can leave the default of “News & Blogs” alone if you want. Click “Next”.

The account is ready to be created: click “Finish”.

Now that you have Thunderbird configured for RSS, you’ll want to “Manage Subscriptions”.

Since you haven’t subscribed to anything yet, this list is empty. Let’s “Add” a subscription.

You need more things to distract you: I prescribe the RSS feed for the Unshelved webcomic. The URL for that is http://www.overduemedia.com/rss.aspx. I looked for the orange RSS logo on the main Unshelved web site, then right-clicked on that logo and clicked “Copy Link Location”. Once you’ve entered the URL in Thunderbird, click “OK”.

Now your subscriptions include “Unshelved”.

Enjoy!