Re: Is this thing on?

Once it's set up properly, Outlook Express works fine for me.
There are a lot of configuration options, so it's easy to set it
up so that it "sucks", but for me it's much faster than Google
Groups. Here's my setup:

Two vertical panes. Left pane: columns for Subject, From and Sent.
To see the newest messages, just click "Sent" column once or twice.
Message is in the right pane. Messages are marked as read after being
viewed for 0 seconds.
View: Hide read messages, group messages by conversation
Check for new messages every 2 minutes
Automatically expand grouped messages
Automatically download message in preview pane

So to read messages, just select one in the left pane, and use
the cursor down button to read the next. One keypress, one message.
Space bar does almost the same but it will scroll the message once
per press if the message is more than one windowful long. Good for
reading messages from those evil bottom-posters.
Unread messages are displayed in boldface. To clean up, just press F5
and the read messages will be hidden. To see them, just change the
view settings to View: Show All Messages.

Read all the messages in a thread, and the new messages to the thread
show up at the top of the message list along with the new threads. I
just leave the other stuff unread (too many messages on RGP now to read
everything) and every now and then, just "Mark All Read" (Ctrl-Shift-A),
hit F5, and start again.

I've tried earlier versions of Thunderbird and Agent, and never got them
to the point where they were as convenient as my current Outlook Express
setup.

-Mark
--
http://pinballpal.com/

"G-man uk" <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:5g73ekF3dpe2aU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PT wrote:
This problem is bigger than Google. My usenet provider (newshosting.com) was down all last night. This is the first time it
went down for that long that I can remember. Something tells me it was not a coincidence.

It's good to have a backup for Google - even though newsreaders suck.

You'd think by now someone would write a good newsreader program with an HTML interface similar to google, but connected directly
to a usenet provider. Thunderbird, Outlook and Agent all suck. I've even downloaded and tried a couple of new newsreaders
recently and they suck even worse.

They can't ALL be bad. Perhaps you just need to spend a little time with them to understand how to get the best out of them.

I personally use Thunderbird and haven't had any problems with it. If you insist on your reliance on Google, then you have no
cause to complain when it fails.

Usenet itself, like the internet, does not 'go down'. Individual service providers may however. I have not had any problems with
my news feed for several *years* now.





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