Usenet Reader Quest - followup

Posted on July 24, 2006 One Comment

I’m back from vacation! Well, I worked every day I was gone so not sure how much of a vacation it truly was… but at least it was from a different city. And honestly, a change of scenery and visiting with family in another state is always fun. Even if you have to work a bit around the edges.

Few weeks ago I posted about my quest for a Usenet Reader. Shortly afterwards I decided to give Mozilla Thunderbird a shot. Hadn’t used it in years so it seemed like a good excuse to take another run at it. First thing I found interesting is that you have to dig pretty deep at that website to find any mention of being able to use Thunderbird to read Usenet! Definitely not something the mozilla folks are touting any more it would seem.

I also see, from the Account Settings dialog (thumbnail at left), that I can also use this as an RSS reader (also not touted at the product page). I probably won’t mess with too much as I like web-based RSS readers better (I use too many different machines). However, I did toss in a few subs just to see how it looked. Nice! Very simple to add new feeds and very easy to read as well. Seems to do the job just fine if looking for a desktop based RSS reader.

The usenet reading portion of this thing is just as easy to use as the RSS reader. Assuming you know your Usenet server info (comcast makes it pretty simple to find online). I got it setup and added a few groups in just a couple of minutes. For basic reading it seems quite functional. One thing that I haven’t figured out yet though: With Agent, I would delete threads after I read them to help keep my list nice and tidy. Not an option with Thunderbird as far as I can see. So… I’m wondering how to keep the thread list pruned. Does it just grow forever? But other than that, it seems to do the job just fine for now.

Note: I haven’t tried with any binaries groups. Rich commented that he was underwhelmed by how it handles ‘em. I don’t tend to wander into ‘em these days so haven’t factored that in yet.

I may continue to investigate options over time (still open to suggestions) and as time allows. Usenet isn’t nearly as interesting too me as it was 10 or even 5 years ago. But it is nice to be able to check some old favorite groups from time to time.

Tags: mozilla, thunderbird, usenet, usenet-reader