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What in means, in over simplified terms, is the feed is like saying send me a notice whenever something new is added.

If your email client automatically checks your mail every few minutes you will have the pleasure of a "chime" continuously and your in-box will be full forever. Not a good idea if you don't have a hugh amount of space in your in-box. The effect is the same as being mailbombed, hundreds or thousands of emails at once. You machine may freeze for a few minutes or lock up until you reboot. Be judicious when you set this up, you may find that you have been FReeped.

What in means, in over simplified terms, is the feed is like saying send me a notice whenever something new is added.

Fortunately, no. RSS is updated on your schedule not free republic's. You can say how often you want to check for new material from 1 second to two weeks, free republic gets to decide how many new articles to send you, from 1 to 20 to every post since your last request. In Free Republic's case it appears to be the last 15 items to be posted. Unless you deliberately save an item RSS feeds aren't saved on your hard drive after you refresh everything.

So it's not really like mail at all in that the items are a lot more fleeting -- you most certainly will not get every post made on the free republic this way unless you go to extraordinary lengths to do so. But you can safely use this feed along with your other newsfeeds to have a consistant newsbrowsing environment that saves you from most forms of advertising until you actually want to go see the post.

I set up the free republic on my website feedreader (which is just a small personal page which the log files show as being blissfully ignored by the rest of the world) you're welcome to see how the feed actually would work in your browser and email. (Note the feed actually isn't refreshed until you hit the "up arrow" by the RSS graphic or if an hour has passed since the last update).

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/browse.rss