Re: Good News Reader?

[Colin Marquardt <colin.marquardt@gmx.de>]

Hi,

* Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au> writes:

> 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).

This isn´t really Gnus´ fault, I think. It works fine here.

> - can't get PGP support to work. Haven't even tried GPG.

Use mailcrypt. The newest version (3.5.5,
http://cag-www.lcs.mit.edu/mailcrypt/) supports GPG, but
unfortunately not MIME-PGP, only clearsigning. Also no automated
key-fetching for GPG. But that shouldn´t be too far away.

> - requires xemacs, and xemacs is huge and slow (I don't have enough

Not really true :-) AFAIR, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen himself uses FSF
Emacs.

> - 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.

The current stable version needs external support. Metamail for
processing gotten and TM (Tools for MIME) for creating MIME
stuff. It works just fine for me, though (but then, I don´t use it
much).

However, thare is a new version not too far away (it is already
packaged, but not ready for the faint of the heart yet). This
so-called pGnus has native, excellent MIME support.

> - requires memorizing complicated sequence of keystrokes.

But has a menu. And (X)Emacs can teach you commands:

| `teach-extended-commands-p' (Customizable user variable)
| 
|   *If true, then `execute' will teach you keybindings.
|   Any time you execute a command with execute which has a
|   shorter keybinding, you will be shown the alternate binding before the
|   command executes.

> - can't forward mail as MIME attachments (not that I have seen anyway).

Use TM, and do S O m (calls the function gnus-uu-digest-mail-forward;
see, it also can make digests of mails :-)

> - can't reply to multiple messages at the same time.

Thanks you! I just discovered a new function! :-) (And that was
with intuition: once you get the knack of it...)

Process-mark the articles you want to reply to (with the # keey in
the Summary buffer), then use r, f, R or F (reply or wide reply,
uppercase means quote original message).

> - don't know how to find all child articles for a given parent.

Hmm, sorry, I don´t know about this.

> I have seen another package for xemacs, mews. Anyone tried it???

No.

> 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.

Gnus can do expiry without a gateway (different for each mailgroup
if you want), so the "dislike"-points are moot.

Have I already said I really like Gnus? :-) If you want, I can dig
up URLs to tutorials tomorrow or next week.

HTH,
  Colin

PS. ...and we haven´t even talked about the *really* cool features of
Gnus... like auto-scoring (learns what you want to read and what not (by
"artificial stupidity", to quote the manual) and scores accordingly).

-- 
Colin Marquardt <colin.marquardt@gmx.de>