SubscribeUpdate on Outlook 2007/IE7 and FeedBurner Subscriber statistics
Thanks to the great help by Rick Klau, VP, Publisher Services, FeedBurner, the problem I raised earlier today in a blog post has been identified.
According to a post by the Microsoft RSS team, Outlook 2007/IE7 should identify themselves in the HTTP request of an RSS feed as “Windows-RSS-Platform/1.0″ when requesting subscribed feeds. Rick determined though that Outlook 2007 B2TR identifies itself as “Mozilla/4.0″, which is the user-agent string used by IE7 when a feed is just browsed to. Therefore all subscriptions from Outlook 2007 didn’t get counted, but rather recorded as hits by a webbrowser. I will keep you updated.
October 4th, 2006 at 0:13
[…] Update […]
October 4th, 2006 at 0:47
Hi Patrick:
For any readers interested in following this, here’s a link to my summary of what we know so far:
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=27646#27646
Bottom line: it appears that the user agent for IE7 (browser) and OL2007 are identical (but do not follow the convention laid out in Microsoft’s original post on the subject), and IE7 (subscribed) is different (but does conform to the original post).
We’ll see what we hear from Microsoft.
–Rick
October 10th, 2006 at 20:23
[…] As diagnosed correctly by FeedBurner, the problem of Outlook 2007 not being counted in the RSS subscription statistics lays with Outlook. Michael Affronti, the Outlook Program Manager responsible for the RSS feature, just announced that Outlook 2007 doesn’t and won’t report a custom user-agent string. That means, any service, not just FeedBurner, trying to interpret the data will only see requests from IE7 that look like someone is browsing a feed. Without a custom user-agent string, there is simply no way to differentiate real IE7 feed browsing from an Outlook 2007 feed subscription. […]