Requiest for News Reader Recommendation

[Bill Davidsen]

Styma, Robert E (Robert) wrote:
> I have been using Thunderbird for my home email client
> and news reader for a long time.  Ever since I loaded
> FC6, things have been going downhill reading news.  I
> have one newsgroup account through the ISP and one
> through usenetserver.com.  The usenetserver.com account
> requires a login and password, the ISP (Cox) does not.
> The usenetserver account usually gets a password failed
> message and then makes me reenter the long login and
> password.  Often, it just gets errors connecting with
> the server.  At first, I suspected the server site, but
> a program I wrote which uses NNTP to download files 
> off newsgroups connects just fine.  I tried deleting my
> mail and news password file and rebuilding it, but that
> did not help.  
>    One options is to bring up Wire Shark and try to track
> down the problem.  The other it to find a different 
> newsgroup reader.   Most of the time at home  I am looking at either
> comics or the railroad pictures newsgroups so binary
> processing is a required.
> 
> Any recommendations of news readers you like?
> 
You actually might want several. For text groups like this I use 
Seamonkey, which is a suite like the old netscape. You can have news and 
mail, separate accounts for each server, and separate retention on each 
group, so if you don't want to see old articles you can limit by age or 
just count. Also handles putting stuff from multiple mail accounts in a 
single mailbox, message filers, many good things.

For binary pan wins hands down, with one caveat, it doesn't handle 
multiple servers quite as well as it used to, the primary and fallback 
settings don't seem to do what I would expect, which is to pull missing 
articles from the fallback server if they are not on the primary. The 
directory finder for saves is not quite right, it was in an earlier 
version, occasionally drops back to some default directory.

And I still have a few accounts I read with pine, since it is *really* a 
text system and can't get bitten by any fancy broken URLs, HTML tricks, 
holes in graphics display programs, etc. I use that to read mail to a 
few accounts I use which draw a lot of real hate mail (blog responses).

Finally, if you follow RSS feeds, currently Thunderbird seems to do the 
best job, making them look like a mailing list.

Those are the ones I use, there are dozens more I tried and didn't find 
suited me (I ran nntp servers for fortune 100 companies and national 
ISPs for 17 years, and saw a lot of newsreaders), but they might work 
the way you want.

Take your pick, one size does *not* fit all, and fortunately it doesn't 
have to.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot