Prerequisites

It is strongly recommended you have curl installed, either in your PATH or configured via ‘elfeed-curl-program-name’. Elfeed will prefer it to Emacs’ own URL-fetching mechanism, ‘url-retrieve’. It’s also essential for running Elfeed on Windows, where ‘url-retrieve’ is broken. Updates using curl are significantly faster than the built-in method, both for you and the feed hosts.

If this is giving you problems, fetching with curl can be disabled by setting ‘elfeed-use-curl’ to nil.