Hi gang. Well it's fun to be using usenet again but it's no longer available from my ISP and no longer accessible via tin. Does anyone know how one goes about writing a kill file that will work on Google Groups? Thanks,
Ed - if you still have access to tin, you might look at: news.individual.net they charge $20 per year for access to usenet and tin can read & display their data.
I assume that you are using Unix or Linux - you mention "tin" - which is still available in Linux-Mint repositories and I assume on other Debian systems. There are also a number of other NNTP readers for Linux available or one could run "Forte Agent", a normally Windows application, in Linux via Wine
I've been using Claws Mail for a number of years now on Linux for both email and usenet. It is somewhat similar to Forte Agent in appearance. See:
formatting link
When I first started using Claws its filtering was much more useful than Agent. Provided you could work with regular expressions and didn't mind tinkering with them. I have no idea how Agent has progressed since then...
Why "pointless"? If I think that Joe Doe is a "no good" I just put him in the kill file and never see him again. As for reciprocal blocking. why do I care if Joe reads my posts, or not, as I never get to hear his laments.
I've been using Claws-Mail for a while as an e-mail program and I find that although it is remarkably powerful and versatile it is a real pain in the butt to get working the way that you want it to. Primarily because of its versatility and the many plug-ins that it has.
And... the lack, or at least I can't find one, of a comprehensive help manual covering all its possible functions.
The Spamassassin plugin is a perfect example. First you need to download the plugin, then you need to add it to Claws in the Configuration-Preferences section. Then you need to select plugins and click on the block that says "Enable Spamassassin Plugin", and than go to "/etc and locate the configuration file for Spamassassin, which isn't in the /etc/spamassassin directory but in the /etc/default directory and enable spamassassin.
Which all makes prefect sense if you know how to do it but is rather confusing if you don't :-)
But I will say that once you get it figured out it is a very powerful addition to Claws-Mail :-)
The problem with Eternal September *is* the idiots -- and the fact that Eternal September will not kick off someone who abuses the system, so a certain percentage of the news servers block *anything* from Eternal September.
The name comes from the problems when every September, a new batch of students in college gained access to usenet for the first time, and did not bother to learn the netequette associated with that, so it took a while to train them. Then, AOL startd offering usenet (gone now) and this meant that there were always newbies who needed to be trained joining AOL -- an eternal September -- to the point where they outnumbered those who knew and observed Netequette.
Just be warned that you will limit the number of readers if you use that news server.
Yes, I have to agree with all that. It isn't for the faint of heart, rather the nerdy tinkering type :)
I do my own filtering via keywords, addresses... using regular expressions. Pretty much went to a positive list now. If you aren't on it, you get moved to the spam folder...
I'm on the mailing-list, so I see a lot of that kind of stuff asked about. Being patient and following the mail-list is about the only way to figure out things like that. See:
Thanks for the address. I like the versatility of Claws-Mail (If I can only get it working :-)
And, as you say, I pretty much use a filter which deletes messages from "X, Y and Z" and then spamassassin has a shot at what is left. Sort of blunt instrument effect but does do a good job of getting rid of the "Mrs. Jones would like to meet you" and "I am your very own banker and you have just inherited $100,000,000 please send your bank account specifics..." messages. :-)
My newsreader, slrn, can do some of that -- but it does a tremendous job of slowing down starting in a given newsgroup. This is because the nntp servers offer a selected group of headers which can be used in filters (as well as showing the list of articles, posters, and subject lines for selection of *what* to read), and those go quite fast.
To filter on anything else (especially content) requires downloading *all* of each article for filtering -- and then later downloading *all* of each article which you select to read yet again. The delay from the latter is not noticeable, as anything other than a binary is unlikely to be large enough to take a significant time to download -- but the first scan (all unread articles) if it is required to download everything for all of the articles just to filter them, can take quite a while.
In particular, I had to drop filtering on the "Newsgroups: " header, because that forced it to download everything. That particular header is not included in the summary of headers offered by the news server.
For fairly quite nesgroups, there were not enough to be a problem, and back when I ran my own news server, everything was already on a local system, so the downloading of full articles for filtering was a lot quicker. (T1 feed vs even 10BaseT, let alone 100BaseT local ethernet.)
I first started using this after AOL got access to the intrawebs and have used it ever since. After that came killing certain keywords or posters, but this one is still the most effective by far.
Re: providers, I've used both eternal-september and albasani and never had any problem with them, and I've used Forte-Agent since version
1.something. The one thing, as you say, I find missing with Agent filtering is the inability to filter on words contained in the message body which is useful if you have filtered, say "joe-dokes" and no longer see his posts, but you do still see any responses that are made to his posts.
I'm on the 25G plan. BTW, I just turned off my KU subscription and found that I've been very, very spoiled by the Kindle. Hefting books from the library is a bore. Pressing on the righthand page results in nothing happening, etc. The first day I had my Kindle, I found myself turning over the device looking for the next page. It happened several times before I got used to the Next button.
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