Ot: Help with Thunderbird newsgroup reader

Thunderbird/3.1.8 has been released. Your headers say you are using thunderbird/3.1.7 so start here:

Thunderbird is an _email_ client. AGENT is my newsgroup client.

What program are you _really_ using, Steve, Seamonkey?

-- Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. -- Pete Seeger

I use 3.1.7 without issue. I suspect it is your ISP.

They might have software that marks it read if from you or the like. Maybe there is a filter on you or you deliver to the wrong place.

Might be a setting in the setup. Martin

Agent may be your news reader, but it doesn't have to be. Thunderbird reads news just as well as mail.

Bob

I didn't care for 3. Tried it twice and decided it wasn't quite done yet.

Thunderbird 3.1.7 here, post thru eternal september. No problems.

Maybe your ISP is trying to wean you from newsgroups so they can shutdown that service?

technomaNge

Heh. I'm still using Netscape 4.78, for that very reason. :)

That was a good one. Probably the best of it's time.

But it's rather dated now.

There are add-ins for Thunderbird and Firefox that make it very similar to Netscape 4.

Might want to give them a try some day.

Speaking of SeaMonkey, I've been using it since Netscape disappeared (several years ago) and it's been just great. switch back and forth between news/e-mail and browser etc. A truly " All in One". :-) ...lew...

Netscrape 4.75 here. I periodically try others, but I keep coming back to NS because it simply works as it should and I just don't care for the others.

I tried it but didn't like the email much, weaning myself from MicroSloth's only truly good piece of software, Outlook Express. I settled on Firefox browser and Thunderbird email, retaining Agent for news as I had for the past 15 years. I'm still pissed that you can't filter on text, so I could finally kill all troll messages and any message by some dipshit who replies to them. I hate twitting the otherwise better third of the group. Too freakin' many people feed the damned trolls, daily.

-- Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. -- Pete Seeger

Well, I had to give up with Thunderbird for newsgroups, at least at home. giganews now holds 600,000 messages back to 2003, and my home Thunderbird just couldn't handle that in its database. My work computer seems to handle it for now. I don't know if this is related, do you have long pauses when using Thunderbird?

I have started using Knode for newsgroups, and it seems to work much better with Giganews, it only loads the last month of traffic.

Jon

Can't you set a limit on the number of headers to download on Thunderbird? You could with Netscape, which Thunderbird was based on. I have mine set at 10,000.

It seems with newsgroups, it would then read 10000 of the OLDEST messages, not the latest! Anyway, I tried a bunch of different combinations, and none of them seemed to really work. Also, any time I unsubscribed and re-subscribed to the group, it took at least an hour to read through all the headers. A setting to "only load the last 30 days" of headers was what I WANTED, I think, but I couldn't find any such setting. Really, GigaNews is the problem, they are keeping everything from non-binary newsgroups back to the company's inception date, June something, 2003.

Anyway, knode works, it only reads the latest headers from so many days back, and does in a second what Thunderbird took minutes to do each time I opened the group. Thunderbird was not only screwed up when opening the group, it ALSO would hang every few minutes when just reading/answering email! But, that was CAUSED by the large number of newsgroup headers overfilling its internal database.

Jon

Set it to a small number, and select, mark as read for the remaining messages. Then download that group of messages. If they are marked read, they won't bother you. I have over 918,000 messages in one group, using Giganews. That's what I did with Netscape after Erthlink switched from Supernews to Giganews.