Re: How to join two fields


"David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns973697B011542f99a49ed1d0c49c5bbb2@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> "ironcito" <correo@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
> news:1135443943.779686.60320@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>
> > Randy Harris wrote:
> >
> >> I have looked extensively for a replacement for OE. There are
> >> better newsreaders and there are better mail clients. But, if
> >> you want a single program that does both there just isn't
> >> anything better. I think I've tried them all.
> >
> > Thunderbird? I just recently migrated to Thunderbird for email,
> > and its cool. My ISP doesn't have a Usenet server, so I just post
> > and read through Google, but Tbird does have an integrated news
> > reader.
>
> The whole concept of a combined mail client/newsreader is flawed at
> its basis, because despite the superficial similarities of email
> messages and Usenet posts, the RFCs governing properly formed
> messages/posts are completely different. For instance, the rules for
> content encoding are much more restrictive in Usenet posts than in
> email. Second, there's no agreed-upon standard for 8-bit encoding in
> headers (that means that SUBJECTS, ORGANIZATIONS and FROM addresses
> can't have anything but the lower half of the character set without
> violating the accepted RFCs).
>
> Now, it's theoretically possible to design a single piece of
> software that switches modes and adjusts the outgoing format
> accordingly, but email can be much more richly formatted than Usenet
> posts (though I don't think it's terribly useful, even in email,
> except for, er, marketers), so to really do it right, you'd have to
> have an editor UI that adapts to the different types of messages,
> with Usenet posts having vastly reduced formatting options (they
> really ought to be pure plain text, in any event).
>
> The end result is that you basically end up with a large part of the
> code for the mail client and the news reader being not shared, so
> you might as well have separate programs, seems to me.
>
> A good free standalone newsreader is xNews, but it has a few
> problems, but none of them are really significant.
>
> The sad thing about the combined mail/news clients is that they
> still lack features that I was using in tin in a Telnet window more
> than 10 years ago. Outlook Express was written by people who really
> didn't understand Usenet (I don't think they understood Internet
> email, either, but that's a different issue), and Thunderbird is (in
> my opinion) an ill-conceived effort to rip off and imitate OE.
>
> On the other hand, xNews is a venerable program that was designed on
> the front end to post to Usenet and all of its features are designed
> around the specifics of posting to Usenet. It started life as an
> effort to build a GUI news client, back in the days when tin and trn
> and other such powerful text-based News clients were used in Telnet
> windows, and it doesn't sacrifice any of the features that were
> available way back then.
>
> As a result, some of the UI conventions are not exactly what one
> would expect, but nothing about it is hard to figure out -- just
> about anybody ought to be able to get it running without reading the
> manual. If you *do* read the manual, though, you'll find that it's
> got a number of extremely powerful features that are not clearelyi
> exposed (or not exposed at all) in the graphical interface. So, what
> you get out of it is dependent on how much effort you put into
> learning it.
>
> Clearly, xNews would not be the email client for MLH, but for most
> people in a technical newsgroup like this, I'd think it would be an
> excellent choice.
>
> --
> David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
> usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/


I have to agree. If one stubbornly insists on using a single tool for both
jobs, which I do, he ends up with two inferior tools.

--
Randy Harris
tech at promail dot com
I'm pretty sure I know everything that I can remember.


.

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