*BSD News Article 83803


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From: bkogawa@primenet.com (Bryan Ogawa)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What's your favourite news agent?
Date: 27 Nov 1996 20:00:06 -0700
Organization: Primenet Services for the Internet
Lines: 41
Message-ID: <57iv7m$o7d@nnrp1.news.primenet.com>
References: <329c6199.2275949@news.zippo.com>
X-Posted-By: bkogawa@206.165.5.104 (bkogawa)

wexler@inter.net.il (Enoch Wexler) writes:

>Hi Fellows,

>Do you have at this FreeBSD wonderland a news agent comparable with
>Windows Forte's Agent?

Hm.  I have not used Agent, so I can't tell you.  However, Usenet
originated on Unix, so I expect that most good features of any Windows
newsreader can be gotten for FreeBSD.  Notable exceptions:

  a)  The offline abilities of Agent (I *have* read about it).  As far as
	I know, Agent's the best at this.
  b)  Merger of news and mail in Agent (is this true?).  Usenet is
	distinct from email, and almost every newsreader for Unix makes
	much of this distinction.  This is considered a feature.

Personally, I use nn, because it provides an extremely fast, intuitive
method for reading news.  I can scan my groups (15-20, about 5-800
messages/day) in somewhere around an hour, and read only about 5-15% of
the articles, while being able to see all of them.

Many knowledgeable people use trn, although I can say that nn is a better
fit for what I do when I read news.

>I seem to have trouble with "tin". My remote news server asks for a
>user name and password. "tin" only takes a password and is probably
>using my login name automatically (which is inappropriate).

Hm.  You may want to try slrn or gnus I believe that they have the most
full-featured support of "traditional" newsreaders for this sort of thing.
The author of slrn will probably put it in for you if it's not there
already. He reads news.software.readers .

Alternately, you can use Netscape, which most people consider somewhat
inferior for news reading.  It *should* have the support for username and
password you require. 

>Thanks, Enoch.
--
bryan k. ogawa  <bkogawa@primenet.com>  <bkogawa@netvoyage.net>