Thunderbird avenging the pigeons?
It may be the revenge of the birds, but there seems to be an issue with the latest version of Thunderbird in terms of RSS feed: here is an email from Umberto I got very recently
(…) I have just discovered I missed the latest RSS feeds (the last one downloaded on my Thunderbird for Windows is https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/inherent-difficulties-of-non-bayesian-likelihood-based-inference/) i.e. those published after 8th November.
This happened simultaneously on my 2 computers and only for the POSTS feed of your blog. RSS feeds from other blogs give no problem. Also I have no problem with the Comments feed. This is might be related to the latest Thunderbird version (v. 8.0) which has been been released on 8th November = date of the latest downloaded feed (!).
I have deleted the feed to your posts and tried to install them again but now I get a “https://xianblog.wordpress.com/feed is not a valid feed”. Reinstalling Thunderbird didn’t solve the issue nor even going back to the latest working Thunderbird installation. So I am writing you to let you know about this issue, not to solve my own specific problem but just in case the issue is not due to Thunderbird but to some settings you might have recently modified in your blog.
I have no idea about the problem nor the solution. There was something similar discussed on wordpress five years ago, but unlikely to apply. I will certainly contact wordpress and let interested readers know if they come up with a solution (or at least a reason).
Xi'an's Og 
November 20, 2011 at 10:11 am
Unfortunately it still not working. But thanks for the effort!
November 21, 2011 at 10:00 am
According to maxmanx, the RSS is now working. This could be Thunderbird’s problem… Sorry I cannot help more (have you tried RSS-ing by another mean, like Google?)
November 22, 2011 at 10:47 pm
The feed restarted working, with zero action from my side.
November 23, 2011 at 7:26 am
Great. I figure this is due to the removal of the “^Lf” character in the blocking post. Same thing happened to the ISBA website link.
Now I wonder if things are repeating themselves: the ISBA website link stopped at the CHANCE post and does not include the Microsoft wrote me an email post…
November 20, 2011 at 2:33 am
I don’t think it is thunderbird — I use live bookmarks in Firefox and your feed hasn’t been working for a couple of weeks (all others ok, the last entry I got on the RSS was 8th of November). It has happened with this blog before a few times but tends to fix itself.
November 20, 2011 at 7:58 am
Thanks for pointing this! It may then be that the cut and past from arXiv for the next post introduced non-standard characters…
November 20, 2011 at 8:06 am
I copied the whole post in a file and found indeed that there was a ^Lfinal signaling a non-standard character. I hope this is the solution to this RSS problem… Thanks!