Basic question on Elfeed

I know it is 2022 but I'm new to RSS feeds. Up to now, I've been reading from the sources on the web etc, so I had no real need to use a RSS reader. Now I want to be able to get a feed from arXiv, which (in short) is an open repository of (mostly) scientific papers to keep up to date with what is published in my field. So my general question is how does Elfeed work in terms of data, but in particular: 1. Does it download everything to my computer? 2. Do "already read items" get archived somewhere or are just deleted after a given period of time? 3. Is there a way to bookmark or store some of them locally for future reference? Thanks in advance for all your help; I apologize if my questions are too basic (and probably more on RSS feeds/clients in general more than on Elfeed).

1. Kind of. whatever data is in the feed is downloaded. for example, whatever you see by visiting https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs.rss is saved locally. 2. they are in the same plase as unread items. you simply change your search term to see them. default search term is **@6-months-ago +unread** 3. elfeed supports emacs's native bookmark funciton. you can bookmark an entry just like you can bookmark a regular file.

> Do "already read items" get archived somewhere or are just deleted after a given period of time? This depends on the feed reader. Elfeed never deletes anything, you can view it locally forever. However, note that RSS feeds contain only text and links. Hotlinked media (images, video etc) in your Elfeed database may not be available online in the future.

And here's an on-topic article you didn't ask for. It answers neither of your questions, but I just thought it may be of help. [Managing ArXiv RSS Feeds in Emacs | Chris Cundy](https://cundy.me/post/elfeed/) Note the use of **Atom** feeds, as opposed to **RSS**.

Thanks! The article looks spot-on to what I was trying to achieve.

Thanks for your answer!

Thanks, that's a useful link, especially the example with elfeed-score, because there are more papers being published each day that I can read in a month.