OT - Newsreader question

Sorry to be posting this in a metalworking newsgroup, but y'all seem to know a lot about this stuff.

I am looking for a newsreader. I am currently using Thunderbird but am looking for alternatives. I have tried xnews and of course, OE and none of them seem to do what I would like them to do. Specifically, that would be the ability to filter message content and language. Every newsreader that I have looked at only seems to allow filtration on headers (to, from, subject, etc.) I'm just tired of seeing all those posts in arabic or whatever scribbling they are (there are others too), and if we could filter on content we do do a better job of filtering spam. Is this a pipe dream.

OK. For some possible metal content, can someone tell me where the expression "pipe dream" comes from? I'll have to see if I can DAGS.

Wayne

Reply to
NoOne N Particular
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Shoulda known. Pipe dream is a drug reference (most likely).

wayne

Reply to
NoOne N Particular

NoOne N Particular wrote in news:oZPgj.4658$se5.3323 @nlpi069.nbdc.sbc.com:

"Pipe Dream" is the name given to the "vision" experienced by an Opium smoker.

Reply to
RAM³

Free agent or the full Agent package.

Reply to
clare at snyder.on.ca

Agent for forte. Handles email as well.

formatting link

Reply to
Boris Mohar

Hmm ... look at the *full* headers of the offending articles, and see what "Characterset" they select (if any). You can probably add blocking on the characterset.

Note that some newsreaders (such as unix's trn) allow blocking on the body contents -- but this means that each *good* article has to be downloaded in its entirity at least twice -- once for scanning of the body and once for reading. (Obviously, if it is rejected by the scan, it will not need to be downloaded a second time. :-)

And if you have a *lot* of body items being scanned for, it *may* download once for each item.

And because of the growing practice of top-posting without trimming properly, there is probably a lot of stale information which will have to be downloaded for each scan -- even if you would never read that far down. (An argument against top-posting which I have not seen before. :-)

Also -- look at the "NNTP-Posting-Host: " header, and then use a whois server to look up the range that it covers. A recent spam just caused me to put the following line into the filtering for slrn (my newsreader:

NNTP-Posting-Host: 88\.227\,[190][0-9]*\,[190][0-9]*

which allows any value for the final two octets.

This example is unix based, not Windows -- unless someone has ported it to Windows. Note that when you ask for a good newsreader (or other program), it is worth while stating what OS you wish to use it with. In this case, since you mentioned OE, it would seem to be Windows, but without that, we would have to guess -- or perhaps to look at the headers of your article which often carry clues as to which OS it is from. (Of course, if someone does not bother to mention the OS, it is usually a safe bet that they are using some form of Windows, because that is the only OS whose users seem to assume that it is the *only* OS in use. :-)

I suspect that it comes from the use of opium, which back in the days of the Sherlock Holmes stories (at least) was smoked in a special pipe. And I understand that it *did* lead to rather strange dreams. :-)

Good Luck, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

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