"Mark Old As Read" for NetNewsWire

I recently heard about an RSS reader (can’t remember which) that had a feature to mark all messages older than a certain threshold as “read”. I thought this was an incredibly useful feature, since I often forget to check my feeds for days at a time, and end up with hundreds of unread items that I don’t have time to read.

Luckily my current RSS reader, NetNewsWire, has AppleScript built in, so I whipped up this script that prompts for the number of days you want to keep as unread, and marks the rest as read.

tell application "NetNewsWire"
    display dialog "How many days old to mark read?" default answer "7"
    set numDays to text returned of result
    set threshold to (current date) – (numDays * days)
    set isRead of (headlines of subscriptions where (isRead is equal to false and date published < threshold)) to true
end tell
  • Pili

    Hi, Thanks, this is just what I needed!

    I found this page through google after I had checked Brent Simmons’ script page without success. You might want to let him know about your great little script.

    Here’s Brent’s script listing: http://ranchero.com/category/netnewswire-scripts/