How do I access news groups other then throught IE?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doug Knox MS-MVP
  • Start date Start date
Tim Slattery said:
That's what FreeAgent is these days, the full Agent package with some
features disabled. But you must have misinterpreted something
somewhere, FreeAgent does not kill itself after a trial period. You
can use it for as long as you like.
Click to expand...

No, I said it *cripples* itself after the trial period expires (i.e.,
you download the full version, get to use all its features for a month,
and then it cripples itself to become Free Agent).

Free Agent by disabling many of its functions. It remains a very
usable Usenet client. It will send email, but not receive it. You
can't use the kill list, and some other functions.
Click to expand...

As per my other post 8 hours earlier, I found the killfile function (of
the FULL but trial version which is what you get to download) to be near
useless. All you get for "qualifiers" (they need a different name than
"headers") is Author and E-mail address. That is only useful to
killfile *polite* posters that always use the same moniker or e-mail
address. Remailer users don't. Any user can modify the From field in
their newsreader, and some let you change it on-the-fly in the compose
window for the post. Attempting to killfile nasty posters using Author
and E-mail Address is as stupid as using the Blocked Senders list in OE
and expecting spammers to always use the same name or e-mail address.
Doesn't work.
Looks like it to me.
Click to expand...

So give an example. When I went to define a killfile filter (a function
that was only available when I selected a message), the only
"qualifiers" that it accepted were Author and E-mail Address. I wanted
to killfile a poster using their IP address, so I tried specifying
"NNTP-Posting-Host" as the qualifier with the nasty poster's IP address
as the value, so instead of "Author: Joe Schmuck", I replaced it with
"NNTP-Posting-Host: xx.xx.xx.xx" but Forte wouldn't accept that. It
didn't know how to "understand" that qualifier - because it wasnt' one
of the few (only 2) that was hardcoded in it.

I didn't see anywhere else to define a rule, only to define filters.
When a post was selected, look in the dialog window and you'll see
buttons showing the only 2 qualifiers that it supports (Author and
E-Mail Address). That's it. That's worthless when trying to killfile
anyone other than polite posters.

However, even with most of Forte Agent (full) not doing much more than
what I can do in OE (but with Forte Agent correcting some defects of OE,
like not top-posting but which can be corrected using OE_QuoteFix), the
biggest and immediate reason that I abandoned Forte Agent was the lack
of multiple news server support. I'm not going to define multiple
shortcuts that specify different config files and have to bounce in and
out of Forte to use different news servers. Nor do I really want to
have multiple instances of Forte Agent running to permit concurrent
access (but disconnected use within each instance from the other
instance of Forte Agent).

I tried Forte Agent (full trial version). It failed. Then I tried
Thunderbird. It failed (rules are any better). So what other
newsreaders are there out there? Newsbin is really just a tool to yank
files from binary groups, and I don't visit binary groups. NewsRover is
too clunky, slow (especially to download the groups list), and seems
more like a binary yanking tool than a newsreader.
 
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