Hello All, I have been looking for a excellent newsreader. Currently I have yet to find a excellent one.
I have made comparisons here to non-Debian programs that (slrn and gnus) that may be out-of-date or wrong for Debian. Please tell me if you think anything I have said is wrong. Currently I use mutt for all my mail. It has a number of good features: - excellent support for PGP - adequate support for GPG (could be better IMHO). - excellent support for MIME: - can forward messages as MIME attachments - can attach any number of messages. - can reply to a number of messages at the same time (saves time replying to each one individually - especially if messages are from the same thread). - fast. small. emacs not required or supported (I consider this a feature ;-) ) - supports threading, but perhaps not as good as trn. - doesn't die after period of inactive use and/or while entering messages. - ability to flag messages as high priority. However, mutt doesn't support newsgroups :-( Things I like about trn: - easy to navigate threads. Things I hate about trn: - connection times out while I am writing a message, and crashes whole program without saving list of read messages. There is a long standing bug about this. This only occurs with the Debian version(????). - if too many headers are displayed, top headers will scroll of top of screen. There is another long standing bug against this. A maintainer told me fixing this would require majore redesign of the program (from memory). - Messages marked as read are removed immediately. If I accidently mark a message as read that was important, it is very difficult to find again, even if I realize immediately after making the mistake. - poor support for MIME, and no support for PGP. - doesn't support one way newsgroups that mirror mailing lists (in only one direction) very well. I have a number of these. - no way to flag messages as important. Things I like about slrn: - messages marked as read are not immediately removed. - supports threading, but perhaps not as good as trn. - no timeouts. - can save an entire thread to disk. Although I prefer the cache feature under gnus. Things I dislike about slrn: - poor support for MIME, and no support for PGP. - no way to flag messages as important. - doesn't support one way newsgroups that mirror mailing lists (in only one direction) very well. I have a number of these. - while messages that are marked are not immediately removed, I constantly get mixed up between the keystrokes required for mutt and slrn, and push q, intending the index of messages to fill the entire screen. Wrong! q in slrn goes back to the index of newgroups, hence I have to try and relocate articles that I accidently marked as read. Things I like about gnus: - ability to cache messages by marking them. - ability to mark messages as important. - supports one mailing list --> newsgroup gateways (one direction) but I haven't tested it yet. Things I dislike about gnus: - last 10 times I tried running it, it always crashed on startup, without giving any indication of a problem. xemacs completely died (no response from anything) and I had to kill it. There have been problems with the news server (ie currupted overview files), so perhaps it caused my local files to become currupted (not sure). - can't get PGP support to work. Haven't even tried GPG. - requires xemacs, and xemacs is huge and slow (I don't have enough hard disk space to install it on this computer). - not really sure about MIME support. I read somewhere that it was limited to processing mail with metamail (which I didn't like about trn and slrn), but the admit the documentation could be wrong. - requires memorizing complicated sequence of keystrokes. - can't forward mail as MIME attachments (not that I have seen anyway). - can't reply to multiple messages at the same time. - don't know how to find all child articles for a given parent. I have seen another package for xemacs, mews. Anyone tried it??? Not strictly related, but: Things I like about mail --> news gateways: - automated expiry of articles. Things I dislike about mail --> news gateways: - some I use have been configured for one way operation only. - I can't get cross posts to work. - removes To: header. Hence, when replying to a message, I am not always sure who received the original. -- Brian May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
