Alias said:
I take it you don't care for T-Bird?
It serves my needs. To each his
or her own. Which newsreader do you recommend?
No, I do like Tbird - but ONLY for e-mail (well, I did until I realized
there was no stop-clause for rules which means they all get OR'ed
together, something v3 is going to fix but which I'm not waiting around
for nor want to beta test while it is flaky). For newsgroups, what you
can do in Tbird for rules is extremely minimal. Outlook Express (and
WLM) aren't great, either (you'll notice I don't use them anymore except
for an interim period when rebuilding my host OS from scratch). I could
never get Tbird to do the same handling of Watched threads (to move to
the top of the message list for sorting) that I can in OE, and obviously
I mark a thread watched because I really do want to watch it. Tis a sad
state when dead OE can outperform newer Tbird (but just regarding
newsgroups). The two criteria I demand for a newsreader is a rules set
that is equal to or better than what OE provides and to have Watched
threads at the top of the message list. Tbird fails on both counts.
However, for e-mail, Tbird is very good and their rule set is adequate.
For e-mail, Tbird would've been my choice except for the lack of control
in flow for rule execution (i.e., no stop clause other than the implied
one *if* and only if a rule moves an e-mail to a different folder than
Inbox). That was a showstopper. I need whitelisting rules which bar
any further rules from exercising against already whitelisted mails. I
have rules that, when fired, already identify an unwanted e-mail so I
don't need to waste time exercising more rules on that bad mail. I need
better flow control for rules than is afforded in Tbird. If you don't
use rules then Tbird is a good e-mail client. For newsgroups, I got
disappointed with Tbird since I could do more in OE. Alas, newsgroup
support seems minimal in all these combo email/newsgroup clients.
I trialed many newsreader clients over a couple years. I'd get
disappointed in each and returned to OE. These were off and on trials
when I got tired of OE's shortcomings, especially in groups with lots of
nymshifting trolls, spam, and properly marking all posts in a thread as
watched when new ones got added. I've tried XPN, XanaNews,
SuperGravity, Xnews, and probably others that I don't recall right now.
I eventually settled on 40tude Dialog. I had decided against it in
prior trials but then discovered it could be modified with scripts
assigned to events and message actions, and I could even define custom
scripts for toolbar buttons. I wasn't interested in learning Object
Pascal but instead found a pile of pre-compiled scripts that would let
me modify Dialog to behave better. The folks in news.software.readers
also helped. If I weren't obstinate enough in my last trial to try out
the scripts, I probably would've decided against Dialog.
