Vanguard wrote:

> You just make yourself look foolish,

I'd rather say you do, because you're discussing about a trivial
non-issue. And you ignore fup2p.

> I suppose slapping a paddle into the ocean could in some miniscule way
> affect the tides but no one cares and no one will notice

Well, obviously except some trolls like you, as can be seen in that
sub-thread.

"Sebastian Gottschalk" wrote in message
news:4u7s8sF16rt9vU1@mid.dfncis.de...
> Vanguard wrote:
>
>> You just make yourself look foolish.
>
> I don't make myself look anyway. No one cares for the headers.
> BTW, you're using Outlook Express. How stupid does that look?

I have trialed several other newsreaders. I came back to OE not
because it was the best NNTP client but because the others only
provide marginally better features, and to change requires more
impetus than just because it is different. Periodically I re-review
the other choices but I want something significantly BETTER than OE.
I need a good reason to switch, not an excuse.

Agent is only useful in the paid version as it becomes too overly
crippled in the free version - and if I'm going to compare against OE
then I compare against free versions. Besides, regular expressions
would be the major reason why I would move to Agent but as I've been
told (in their newsgroups) and read in their documentation it only has
them in searches which can be saved but cannot be automatically
triggered on header downloads (i.e., you have to manually run the
saved search and then manually select the matched records to to then
execute a manually selected action). Eventually Agent dumped their
antiquated Windows 3.1 GUI and what did they go to: the 3-pane
interface used by OE. A long-time defect with Agent was that it would
not support multiple NNTP accounts. The workaround was to define
multiple config files that would be specified on the command-line to
load Agent, so you had multiple shortcuts to load multiple instances
of Agent to concurrently access multiple accounts. They added
multiple account support in their latest version but, again, that's
not a feature available in their crippled free version yet multiple
account support exists in MANY free newsreaders.

Thunderbird is a bad joke. Users like to claim it is better but its
rules are less potent than those in OE. In other words, rules in
Thunderbird suck. I consider the rules in OE to be lacking and
Thunderbird's are worse. Everytime I asked about how to configure
Thunderbird regarding behavior or function, too often I had to go edit
config files since those features were not available via the GUI.

40tude seemed good but is another similar client with little
capability in its rules; i.e., it didn't seem any better than OE. It
doesn't seem much supported, if at all, and has been in beta status
for how long? Read their version history at
http://www.40tude.com/dialog/history.htm. It is still beta. That
list hasn't been updated since I read it just over a year ago (and I
don't how odl 2.0.15.1 was at that time), so it's another dead
program. Useful perhaps but dead. OE is dead, too, but if I'm going
to switch then I'd like to move to a product that is supported or, at
least, getting improved or fixed. The author of 40tude coded it
assuming a non-secure Windows 3.x/9x environment. That is, 40tude
hasn't a concept of separating config files based on NT accounts, so
one user will end up stepping on another user's setup of 40tude. Gee,
what happened to all those groups to which I subscribed and where did
those new ones come from? Some other user logged in and changed
40tude's setup.

I did use OE-QuoteFix until SP2 for Windows XP killed it. SP2 also
provided the biggest reasons why I used OE-Quotefix: bottom posting
and sig at bottom (via registry edits). The color-coding was iffy in
OE-QuoteFix and it had a defect if the post to which you replied
didn't have a CR at the end of the last line. OE-QuoteFix is another
dead tool: useful if it still works for you and you don't know about
OE's registry edits (which means you need to have WinXP) but a dead
product. The last update to OE-QuoteFix was way back on ... I also
tried the Fidolook wrapper for OE but its documentation sucks (unless
you know German) and also seems another college kid's abandoned class
project.

I also trialed Gravity, XanaNews, Newsrover, Newsbin, and Xnews.
Xnews was the only one that had decent support and implementation of
regular expressions (but which you edit outside of the GUI).
Unfortunately I found out that many NNTP servers only proffer the
overview headers and what I want to filter on are in the extended
headers. However, it has GUI problems and the author has apparently
never experienced using context menus (right-click) to add properties
or functions to object types rather than have you navigate through
menues. Xnews also has problems with memory bloat and will freeze for
NNTP servers with large number of posts (i.e., with high retention).
Click on a post and the highlight is instead of a different post.
Read a post within a thread and upon return to that newsgroup the
entire thread is gone (unless you hunt to find the option to enable
Xnews to reread the newsgroup, or you
use Ctrl+F5 to resync all the threads). I never found a way to mark a
thread to watch it (i.e., no flags), something very important to me.
I want posts to which I've started, responded, or am interested to
appear at the *top* of the header list. Rather than have a 3-pane
view to show the newsgroups (under the news servers) in a tree list,
the message list, and a preview of a selected message, you instead
first see the newsgroups list (and for only one server at a time).
Then when you pick a newsgroup, you no longer can see the newsgroups
list and are instead looking at a split view for the messages list and
preview of the messages. You can wrangle the multiple opened windows
tile them but the content of the tiles is not enforced by their
position. To switch between servers, you use the tabs at the bottom
of the screen but those tabs won't appear until the first time you
visit the news server which must be performed using the menues. When
I opened a newsgroup, there was a delay before seeing the messages,
and when opening the messages
there was sometimes a delay, and there was a delay when refreshing
their
threading. There are other delays and then I found out it was because
of the memory bloat. Xnews is another dead newsreader: no updates in
over 3 years.

If I were to switch, it probably would be to Xnews despite its GUI
defects or deficiencies. Not because the GUI is better or anything
else other than far more potent rules because of adding regular
expressions that can check anywhere in any header. I tried using
NewsProxy with OE to give me regular expressions but it goes
unresponsive pretty quickly while just sitting idle (it runs as a
background process that constantly sucks up memory even when you are
not using any NNTP client).

So just what number of NNTP clients have *YOU* trialed to find what is
best for you, and how often do you review again? I figure 6-months
interval is all I'm going to waste my time in finding something FAR
superior to OE to give me a reason to switch that has BETTER rules
with a strong preference that the automatically exercised rules
incorporate a decent potency in regular expressions. So far I've been
disappointed in the *free* alternatives to free OE. There are decent
*paid* commercialware alternatives to free OE. OE has defects. So do
the other choices. They just have different defects.

On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 20:30:31 -0600, "Vanguard"
wrote:

>Agent is only useful in the paid version as it becomes too overly
>crippled in the free version - and if I'm going to compare against OE
>then I compare against free versions. Besides, regular expressions
>would be the major reason why I would move to Agent but as I've been
>told (in their newsgroups) and read in their documentation it only has
>them in searches which can be saved but cannot be automatically
>triggered on header downloads (i.e., you have to manually run the
>saved search and then manually select the matched records to to then
>execute a manually selected action). Eventually Agent dumped their

You must have misunderstood. You can use regular expressions in Agent
filters, and the filters function during header downloads (or manually.)