Suggest good free news reader?

I retired last fall and this computer does not support my old Windoze Mail news reader. Can someone suggest a good free reader? I understand Free Agent is no longer "free".

For the moment I'm slumming it with Google Groups.

Mark Z.

Reply to
Mark Zacharias
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Not saying it is all that great,but I hae been using Microplanet Gravity after switching over to Win 10.

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Reply to
Ralph Mowery

Hello. I use Mozilla Thunderbird both as an e-mail client and for usenet. Works fine for both IMHO. Sincerely,

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Reply to
J.B. Wood

ditto on mozilla and eternal-september for posting to usenet

Reply to
N_Cook

T-bird has it's issues. If you don't periodically prune old messages below some number T-bird gets cranky and just plain goes away for sometimes long periods. It also doesn't properly implement many of the features you might like for reading newsgroups. But it will do the job and it is free as in beer. I guess it's free in other ways as well not that it helps a lot.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

I use Thunderbird as well, along with AIOE new server. Both are free.

And yes, as mentioned, you have to periodically delete expired articles.

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Reply to
Foxs Mercantile

Hello, and I've run 32-bit T-Bird versions on Linux and Windows for a number of years now and have never seen the issue you describe. When an nntp news server no longer has the posts available they don't show up on the client subscribed lists either. Other than using "mark as read" I've never had to do any pruning. Sincerely,

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Reply to
J.B. Wood

l news reader. Can someone suggest a good free reader? I understand Free Ag ent is no longer "free".

Is there (and this is a serious question) any reason not to access the grou ps through Google? Maybe it's because I don't know what I'm missing, but t he pages load immediately, new posts are updated almost as fast, it's free, and apparently my posts are getting through because Phil picks on me now a nd again!!

What, if any, features or benefits will I gain by using a dedicated newsrea der?

Reply to
ohger1s

I've been using Pine since shortly after sci.electronics split up, but it's really a mailreader that does newsgroups. But I stayed with it so long, that I'm not in the mood to change.

It's now morphed to Alpine, but I think there's a Windows version.

Usually when someone asks this question, they really mean a news server, but I assume you know better.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

Mostly I use an alternate access to Usenet as I don't want to feed Google any more than I have to.

Also Thunderbird (and Giganews for access) works very well on my Mac.

Googegroups also redacts the senders email and that can be a problem if you want to ask or answer a question that you aren't interested in posting to the world.

It is fine that Google is archiving Usenet, however there have been many complaints over the years when compared to the previous archive - Dejanews.

John :-#)#

Reply to
John Robertson

I don't know what to tell you. I have found *numerous* bugs on more than one computer, all running a version of windows. One of the many bugs is that even though I've set it to download the full messages, it doesn't download them until I ask to read them and often doesn't retain them and has to download them repeatedly. That failure gives rise to

Error! newsgroup server responded:No such article number 3392

Perhaps the article has expired

Click here to remove all expired articles

These messages should have been downloaded and retained, but instead they are often lost.

T-bird on my system has serious problems with internal delays. I see nothing indicating the system is stressed, but T-bird hangs for seconds to as much as a minute or two. No other program does this, so it can't be a system issue.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

Phil will pick on you even if your posts never make it to the newsgroup. Phil's issues transcend the Internet.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

tin :) The best ever and totally free.

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Reply to
Sergey Kubushyn

I have been using MicroPlanet Gravity for years. I even paid for it back when it was not free (I was actually using Netscape Navigator for newsreading, but it had become unstable!!) It is open source now. Somebody else posted the link. It works fine with Win10 64-bit, although it's weekly automatic compacting of newsgroups seems much slower than on my old Win7 computer for some reason.

For a server, if you are not interested in binary groups, then eternal- september.org works well, and it's free. I've been using that since AT&T and then Comcast dropped their newsgroup support.

If you haven't done so, also check out the newsgroup news.software.readers.

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Reply to
Andrew Rossmann

Mark I have been using Free Agent 3.3 for years. It is still available at

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Are you enjoying retirement? Trying to decide whether to do it this summer or next May. Chuck

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Reply to
Chuck

But does it run on Windows?

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

What is Windows?

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Reply to
Sergey Kubushyn

I don't know, I hear talk of some new operating system.

But the real issue is that apparently that's what Mark is using, so "running on Windows" would seem to be a necessary matter here.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

Guys, again, what is the advantage of using a dedicated news reader as opposed to just using Google groups? I'm not being adversarial as I don't have a clue what a dedicated news reader program does or why it's better.

This is what I see when I access through Google:

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New posts show up as soon as they're posted and my postings are updated immediately as well.

Reply to
ohger1s

Google sucks big time. Not just that is it evil, not just one must be stupid to trust them (some even store all their documents with them), but have you ever read something written in any language but English from Google? E.g. russian language groups are epic failure, screwed up beyond repair...

Then does anybody here remember Vera Lynn^W^Weh, eg. AOL Virtual Cities or whatever it's been called back then? Never ever put all eggs in the same basket. The power of Usenet is that nobody owns it, there is no management who could shut it down, nobody to sue, no single location and so on. Usenet is _NOT_ a business so it can't go belly up or decide to pump up their profits by axing those parts that don't bring enough revenue not even mentioning those not bringing any revenue at all with absolutely no prospect of improving in foreseable future...

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Reply to
Sergey Kubushyn

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