Good News Reader?
Hello All,
I have been looking for a excellent newsreader. Currently I have yet
to find a excellent one.
I have made comparisons here to non-Debian programs that
(slrn and gnus) that may be out-of-date or wrong for Debian.
Please tell me if you think anything I have said is wrong.
Currently I use mutt for all my mail. It has a number of good
features:
- excellent support for PGP
- adequate support for GPG (could be better IMHO).
- excellent support for MIME:
- can forward messages as MIME attachments
- can attach any number of messages.
- can reply to a number of messages at the same time
(saves time replying to each one individually - especially
if messages are from the same thread).
- fast. small. emacs not required or supported (I consider this
a feature ;-) )
- supports threading, but perhaps not as good as trn.
- doesn't die after period of inactive use and/or while entering
messages.
- ability to flag messages as high priority.
However, mutt doesn't support newsgroups :-(
Things I like about trn:
- easy to navigate threads.
Things I hate about trn:
- connection times out while I am writing a message, and crashes
whole program without saving list of read messages. There
is a long standing bug about this. This only occurs with the
Debian version(????).
- if too many headers are displayed, top headers will scroll of top
of screen. There is another long standing bug against this. A
maintainer told me fixing this would require majore redesign of
the program (from memory).
- Messages marked as read are removed immediately. If I accidently
mark a message as read that was important, it is very difficult
to find again, even if I realize immediately after making the mistake.
- poor support for MIME, and no support for PGP.
- doesn't support one way newsgroups that mirror mailing lists
(in only one direction) very well. I have a number of these.
- no way to flag messages as important.
Things I like about slrn:
- messages marked as read are not immediately removed.
- supports threading, but perhaps not as good as trn.
- no timeouts.
- can save an entire thread to disk. Although I prefer the cache
feature under gnus.
Things I dislike about slrn:
- poor support for MIME, and no support for PGP.
- no way to flag messages as important.
- doesn't support one way newsgroups that mirror mailing lists
(in only one direction) very well. I have a number of these.
- while messages that are marked are not immediately removed, I
constantly get mixed up between the keystrokes required for mutt and
slrn, and push q, intending the index of messages to fill the entire
screen. Wrong! q in slrn goes back to the index of newgroups, hence I
have to try and relocate articles that I accidently marked as read.
Things I like about gnus:
- ability to cache messages by marking them.
- ability to mark messages as important.
- supports one mailing list --> newsgroup gateways (one direction)
but I haven't tested it yet.
Things I dislike about gnus:
- last 10 times I tried running it, it always crashed on startup,
without giving any indication of a problem. xemacs completely died (no
response from anything) and I had to kill it. There have been problems
with the news server (ie currupted overview files), so perhaps it caused
my local files to become currupted (not sure).
- can't get PGP support to work. Haven't even tried GPG.
- requires xemacs, and xemacs is huge and slow (I don't have enough
hard disk space to install it on this computer).
- not really sure about MIME support. I read somewhere that it
was limited to processing mail with metamail (which I didn't like
about trn and slrn), but the admit the documentation could be wrong.
- requires memorizing complicated sequence of keystrokes.
- can't forward mail as MIME attachments (not that I have seen anyway).
- can't reply to multiple messages at the same time.
- don't know how to find all child articles for a given parent.
I have seen another package for xemacs, mews. Anyone tried it???
Not strictly related, but:
Things I like about mail --> news gateways:
- automated expiry of articles.
Things I dislike about mail --> news gateways:
- some I use have been configured for one way operation only.
- I can't get cross posts to work.
- removes To: header. Hence, when replying to a message, I am
not always sure who received the original.
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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