news reader

[Tim]

On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 13:23 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> But _why_ do people think Thunderbird or Pan
> is better than KNode, which comes with KDE?
> 
> Simply saying "I like Pan" is not much help.

It's been a while since I tried out different clients, and when I tried
out KNode I found it painful.  So here goes for comments about the
others:

Thunderbird:
-----------
It's not WYSIWYG, it's "you see what Thunderbird thinks of the message
content" (it reparses it, then displays it as if it were rendering
HTML).

It's dire at offline/online work (not caching what you wanted it to,
regetting what you'd looked at moments ago, caching more than you wanted
it to - requiring manual cleaning periodically).

It's quoting just plain sucked.

Pan:
---
Almost WYSIWYG, more a case of you can expect that what you type on the
screen gets sent as you've typed it (no mangling of source code
examples, etc.).

Seems to handle online/offline work mostly okay.  Caches a reasonable
amount of data, as per your requirements, and manages cleaning off old
stuff by itself.  But it seems to fail getting messages from some
servers sometimes, and doesn't retry.  If it times out because of a busy
network, for example, it just sits there until I quit and restart it.
The whole program, no amount hitting stop and trying to refetch a
message I've clicked on worked.

It's quoting is proper verbatim style:  Send back what you got as it was
sent, without mangling it.  You can massage things if you want (unmangle
previously mangled quoted text).

Both of them just plain sucked at handling messages with files attached,
compared to using something like Agent.  Using Agent, you could hop into
some newsgroup with fan pictures from a TV show, for instance, select a
group of messages, fetch them, and the attachments would end up in your
downloads folder - no further action required of you.  It could even
automatically put back together large multi-part messages.  On the other
hand, other clients require you to go into each message and individually
save out each attachment.  Some are a right pain to deal with multi-part
messages.

-- 
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