ANN: NewsHound newsreader add-in for Outlook

[Don Caton]

NewsHound is a MAPI service provider that adds the ability to read,
create and reply to newsgroups right from within Outlook. Now you can
use the features and UI that you are already familiar with in Outlook to
perform your newsgroup activities.

- Newsgroup articles can be stored in any personal folders file, or in
your Exchange mailbox

- Newsgroup articles can be grouped, sorted, organized, searched and
archived using all of Outlook's advanced features

- Newsgroup articles can be copied or linked to contact, task, journal
items and can be added as attachments to emails

- Full integration with Outlook's address book

- All attachment types and popular encoding formats supported (utf-7/8,
uuencode, ISO-8859-x, etc.)

- Full Unicode international language support (when used with Outlook
2003)

- Does NOT require CDO or Microsoft.NET framework, written in C++ for
speed, compact size and minimum memory footprint

NewsHound works with Outlook 2000, 2002/XP and 2003.

Please visit our web site at http://www.shorelinesoftware.com for more
information. An evaluation version is available for download.

 

[Bob]

NewsHound is a MAPI service provider that adds the ability to read,
create and reply to newsgroups right from within Outlook. Now you can
use the features and UI that you are already familiar with in Outlook to
perform your newsgroup activities.

Nice list of features, but unless I'm missing something there's a pretty
major flaw. Does it allow only the message headers to be retrieved? Is there
an option for this hidden somewhere?

IMHO this would be a waste of money unless you restricted yourself to just
moderated groups. Even then, very few groups really warrant downloading the
body of every message. For unmoderated groups, you'd be wasting a hell of a
lot of bandwidth & time downloads crap you'll never look at.

Bob

 

[Don Caton]

major flaw. Does it allow only the message headers to be retrieved? Is there
an option for this hidden somewhere?

IMHO this would be a waste of money unless you restricted yourself to just
moderated groups. Even then, very few groups really warrant downloading the
body of every message. For unmoderated groups, you'd be wasting a hell of a
lot of bandwidth & time downloads crap you'll never look at.

Bob

No, in the initial release Newshound does not support downloading
headers only. The reason is because of the way Outlook/MAPI handles
headers-only messages: it will only display them in the inbox folder,
and you cannot move them to another folder. That of course, would be
virtually unusable for newsgroup articles because every new article in
each group you're interested would all be lumped together in the inbox.

So I have to come up with a mechanism to allow headers-only items
outside of the internal Outlook/MAPI mechanism. It isn't an
insurmountable problem and it's on my to-do list for a subsequent (and
free) upgrade, but I didn't want to delay the release of this any
longer.

However, whether downloading the body of every message is a waste of
time or not really depends on your particular circumstances. First, if
you are on a high speed connection, the time it takes to download all
articles is largely irrelevant. Unlike Outlook Express, NewsHound does
not make you wait until it has finished downloading before you can begin
reading new articles, it happens in the background. Second, it depends
on the percentage of articles that you actually read. If you end up
marking and subsequently downloading a lot of headers, you could
actually be wasting time because you have to do a second operation to
retrieve the message body. Here as well, the speed of your connection
is a factor. Also, it takes a bit of time to make that decision; the
speed of your own neural network is a factor <g>.

And finally, an article's subject does not always reflect the real
content of the conversation, so you may choose to ignore messages that
actually would be of interest to you. I have picked up numerous useful
tidbits over the years reading articles that would probably not have
interested me based on the header, at least in the programming-oriented
groups, so I don't use headers even when I used OE.

As an aside... second only to email spam, internet newsgroups could be
the poster child for wasted bandwidth. The practice of mindlessly
quoting every preceding article in a conversation wastes huge amounts of
bandwidth and disk space, not to mention the NNTP headers that often
contain lots of useless information. A simple "thank you" message in an
otherwise interesting thread could have thousands of bytes worth of
regurgitated quotes, but you wouldn't know until you actually downloaded
the message and read it. Usenet is many things, but an efficient use of
bandwidth or disk space isn't one of them.

In any case, I appreciate the feedback. Headers-only is a feature that
will be implemented, and feedback will determine the priority of
features for the next release.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

While I can't comment on this specific program since I haven't looked at it
yet, but the other programs that support news-in-outlook (see products and
resources at the end of this article:
http://www.outlookpower.com/issues/issue200405/00001276002.html) don't do
headers only either. Frankly, I'm not sure the type of person who wants news
in outlook would want headers only - retrieval is a PITA.

Is it a waste of time and space to download full messages from newsgroups?
Probably, but I (and the many other users of the other news-sucking addins)
do it. It's especially nice for groups I monitor but don't usually reply in
and I can read them as I get time, from anywhere, without internet access.

Finally, there is always the free Outlook Express (or many other
newsreaders) if you don't like how the outlook addins work.