TorrentFreak

• Ernesto
• December 13, 2005
• 6
• thunderbird
• Print

A couple of days we wrote a story about BitTorrent & Firefox, today we show how you can use Mozilla’s mail client Thunderbird to organize your (tv) torrents.

A short summary before I lay out all the details.
A lot of torrent sites offer rss feeds of the new torrents that are added. In Thunderbird you can add these feeds. Basically thunderbird does the same thing as a news reader, and all the new torrents will automatically appear in the specified folder. The nice thing is that you have the option to automatically search folders (your feeds) for specific keywords, so you will be notified when a torrent of your favorite tv-show (or another torrent) is published.

Browsing torrent sites to search for your favorite tv-shows is history…

In this “tutorial” I will use the rss-feeds of the latest TV-torrents published by VTV and EZTV (mininova). Those two, publish about 10-20 new torrents a day, and therefore are perfect for us.

This is how things work:

Step1:
Open thunderbird and “create a new account”. You should choose the option “RSS, news and Blogs”, and give it any name you like (torrent feeds or something).

Step2:
Now a new folder should appear in Thunderbird and you are ready to add your favorite rss feeds. In this example I use the EZTV and VTV feeds, you can easily import these feeds using this file, or add them manually.
If everything went like it should, you should see all the latest tv-torrent releases appear in your inbox.

Step3:
Now because you probably don’t want to check these feeds manually every hour or so, we are going to monitor these folders by a “saved search” folder. RightClick on the feeds folder and choose “search messages”. Now select the folders (feeds) you want to search.

The next step is to enter the search terms. You probably want to search for the name of a tv-show. To do this you let Thunderbird search the subject name (pic). Beware, some torrents in have a . in their name, so you should search for “sesame.street” instead of “sesame street”. If you want to be on the safe side, or if you use multiple feeds like we do you could always search for just the keyword “sesame”.
Now the important step, once you entered the search terms (you can add more later on) you should choose “save as search folder”.

Now choose a place to save this folder (not in your feeds folder), and everytime a torrent is released that matches your search term, it will be show up in this folder. So you never have to check the actual feeds, just wait till the torrent shows up in your search folder.

Once the torrent arrives, you can open it by clicking on the message… Easy, no more endless browsing on torrent sites…..

Happy torrenting, but beware.. don’t download copyrighted stuff if you’re not allowed to, it’s wrong, and eventually it will kill you.

Notes:
The use of rss-feeds can be used by other clients too (gmail). You could use message filters instead of “saved searches”.
You could search for other stuff than torrents.. Use your imagination.

RSS-feeds are only usable if the amount of new torrents that are published is relatively low, or if you never shut down your computer. Otherwise you would miss certain torrents because those were published “overnight” and weren’t new anymore when you woke up.

A short summary before I lay out all the details. A lot of torrent sites offer rss feeds of the new torrents that are added. In Thunderbird you can add...