news.software.readers

On 2008-03-01 23:50, Josh Grams wrote:
> Here's what's going on: I just recently started actually following a
> couple of newsgroups, and have tried a bunch of newsreaders (pan, tin,
> pine, slrn, nn, thunderbird, etc., etc.), and I don't really like any
> of them.
>
> On the other hand, I do have a mail setup that I'm at least
> comfortable with, even if it's not great. getmail to fetch, and ssmtp
> to send. I usually use mutt/vim to read/write mail and move it
> around, and have a couple of filters to remove spam or whatever.

You might want to take a look at the NNTP patch for mutt. I've used mutt
as a newsreader for some time, but in the end I went back to slrn. The
handling of newsgroups in mutt was a bit strange, to be polite about it.

> So it seemed obvious (to me) that it would make sense to have a
> program which would simply download messages and store them, and one
> to post, and then use mutt/vim/whatever to filter and actually read
> the stuff.

That shouldn't take more than a day to implement. Maybe I should try it.
(But then I have another mail/news project, which I haven't had time to
work on for a year or so - I should better work on that)

> I can't think of any reason to treat newsgroups differently than an
> e-mail list or any other e-mail conversation. Is there something
> I'm missing?

Mostly they are pretty much the same. There are a couple of differences,
though:

* On usenet you can quickly change to a different newsgroup if the
thread gets on-topic. On mailing-lists that's not so easy, partially
because there is no (reliable) equivalent to the Followup-To header,
and partially because subscribing to a mailing-list is more work (for
the user) than subscribing to a newsgroup.

* Usenet allows you cancel/supercede messages, mailing-lists don't.

* The subscribe/unsubscribe mechanism is completely different.
Even worse, it's not even consistent between mailinglists (although
many mailinglists support RFC 2369 now, despite the lack of clients
which can actually use this information)

(I'm sure I have forgotten something)

Overall the differences - from a user's point of view - are pretty minor
and I don't know why there's no user agent which is both a good mail
user agent and a good news user agent.

(There are of course some more differences at a technical level - but
these need not be visible for the user)

hp