CLI app - allow access?

I'd rather say you do, because you're discussing about a trivial non-issue. And you ignore fup2p.

Well, obviously except some trolls like you, as can be seen in that sub-thread.

"Sebastian Gottschalk" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.dfncis.de...

I have trialed several other newsreaders. I came back to OE not because it was the best NNTP client but because the others only provide marginally better features, and to change requires more impetus than just because it is different. Periodically I re-review the other choices but I want something significantly BETTER than OE. I need a good reason to switch, not an excuse.

Agent is only useful in the paid version as it becomes too overly crippled in the free version - and if I'm going to compare against OE then I compare against free versions. Besides, regular expressions would be the major reason why I would move to Agent but as I've been told (in their newsgroups) and read in their documentation it only has them in searches which can be saved but cannot be automatically triggered on header downloads (i.e., you have to manually run the saved search and then manually select the matched records to to then execute a manually selected action). Eventually Agent dumped their antiquated Windows 3.1 GUI and what did they go to: the 3-pane interface used by OE. A long-time defect with Agent was that it would not support multiple NNTP accounts. The workaround was to define multiple config files that would be specified on the command-line to load Agent, so you had multiple shortcuts to load multiple instances of Agent to concurrently access multiple accounts. They added multiple account support in their latest version but, again, that's not a feature available in their crippled free version yet multiple account support exists in MANY free newsreaders.

Thunderbird is a bad joke. Users like to claim it is better but its rules are less potent than those in OE. In other words, rules in Thunderbird suck. I consider the rules in OE to be lacking and Thunderbird's are worse. Everytime I asked about how to configure Thunderbird regarding behavior or function, too often I had to go edit config files since those features were not available via the GUI.

40tude seemed good but is another similar client with little capability in its rules; i.e., it didn't seem any better than OE. It doesn't seem much supported, if at all, and has been in beta status for how long? Read their version history at It is still beta. That list hasn't been updated since I read it just over a year ago (and I don't how odl 2.0.15.1 was at that time), so it's another dead program. Useful perhaps but dead. OE is dead, too, but if I'm going to switch then I'd like to move to a product that is supported or, at least, getting improved or fixed. The author of 40tude coded it assuming a non-secure Windows 3.x/9x environment. That is, 40tude hasn't a concept of separating config files based on NT accounts, so one user will end up stepping on another user's setup of 40tude. Gee, what happened to all those groups to which I subscribed and where did those new ones come from? Some other user logged in and changed 40tude's setup.

I did use OE-QuoteFix until SP2 for Windows XP killed it. SP2 also provided the biggest reasons why I used OE-Quotefix: bottom posting and sig at bottom (via registry edits). The color-coding was iffy in OE-QuoteFix and it had a defect if the post to which you replied didn't have a CR at the end of the last line. OE-QuoteFix is another dead tool: useful if it still works for you and you don't know about OE's registry edits (which means you need to have WinXP) but a dead product. The last update to OE-QuoteFix was way back on ... I also tried the Fidolook wrapper for OE but its documentation sucks (unless you know German) and also seems another college kid's abandoned class project.

I also trialed Gravity, XanaNews, Newsrover, Newsbin, and Xnews. Xnews was the only one that had decent support and implementation of regular expressions (but which you edit outside of the GUI). Unfortunately I found out that many NNTP servers only proffer the overview headers and what I want to filter on are in the extended headers. However, it has GUI problems and the author has apparently never experienced using context menus (right-click) to add properties or functions to object types rather than have you navigate through menues. Xnews also has problems with memory bloat and will freeze for NNTP servers with large number of posts (i.e., with high retention). Click on a post and the highlight is instead of a different post. Read a post within a thread and upon return to that newsgroup the entire thread is gone (unless you hunt to find the option to enable Xnews to reread the newsgroup, or you use Ctrl+F5 to resync all the threads). I never found a way to mark a thread to watch it (i.e., no flags), something very important to me. I want posts to which I've started, responded, or am interested to appear at the *top* of the header list. Rather than have a 3-pane view to show the newsgroups (under the news servers) in a tree list, the message list, and a preview of a selected message, you instead first see the newsgroups list (and for only one server at a time). Then when you pick a newsgroup, you no longer can see the newsgroups list and are instead looking at a split view for the messages list and preview of the messages. You can wrangle the multiple opened windows tile them but the content of the tiles is not enforced by their position. To switch between servers, you use the tabs at the bottom of the screen but those tabs won't appear until the first time you visit the news server which must be performed using the menues. When I opened a newsgroup, there was a delay before seeing the messages, and when opening the messages there was sometimes a delay, and there was a delay when refreshing their threading. There are other delays and then I found out it was because of the memory bloat. Xnews is another dead newsreader: no updates in over 3 years.

If I were to switch, it probably would be to Xnews despite its GUI defects or deficiencies. Not because the GUI is better or anything else other than far more potent rules because of adding regular expressions that can check anywhere in any header. I tried using NewsProxy with OE to give me regular expressions but it goes unresponsive pretty quickly while just sitting idle (it runs as a background process that constantly sucks up memory even when you are not using any NNTP client).

So just what number of NNTP clients have *YOU* trialed to find what is best for you, and how often do you review again? I figure 6-months interval is all I'm going to waste my time in finding something FAR superior to OE to give me a reason to switch that has BETTER rules with a strong preference that the automatically exercised rules incorporate a decent potency in regular expressions. So far I've been disappointed in the *free* alternatives to free OE. There are decent

*paid* commercialware alternatives to free OE. OE has defects. So do the other choices. They just have different defects.

You must have misunderstood. You can use regular expressions in Agent filters, and the filters function during header downloads (or manually.)