Off topic: What usenet news reader to use?

[John J. Lee]

"Wai-Yip Tung \(wtung\)" <wtung at cisco.com> writes:

> I haven't used Usenet news for a long time. Now that I have subscribed
> to python-list I find that email does not scale well to the high volumne
> of discussion. Instead of deleting emails all day I think I should go
> back to Usenet news. Is there any good Windows news reader you would
> recommend. I'm happily using Opera as the browser. But it's
> revolutionary news and email reader eludes me. What are you using?

Just started using GNUS -- very nice if you already use emacs.  Better
than pine for reading news over a dialup connection, and does
threading better, too.  Not Windows-specific, but both work fine in
Windows.


> By the way I'm also looking for a free or low cost email client. My
> company is using Outlook but I want to find one for personal use. Thank
> you for you suggestions.

Depends what you like.  I like to use IMAP so I can get at my mail
from anywhere.  Pine and Mulberry do IMAP OK.  Pine is very easy to
use (it is once set up, anyway), does (almost) everything I want and
is text menu-based; also does newsreading.  Mulberry is a nice, but
non-free, graphical client with masses of bells and whistles,
including disconnected operation (disconnected mode was a little buggy
about five months ago, not sure how it is now).

fastmail.fm is a good IMAP service provider -- once-off fee for decent
bandwidth and space plus a webmail system to fall back on, repeating
fee if you want support and more bandwidth / space.  Good filtering
system using the Sieve language.


John