After recently getting flamed somewhat for top-posting - apparently Outlook express' default behaviour - I am trying the freeware version of FreeAgent.
Candidly I find it quite clunky and cumbersome. Are there any other freeware newsreaders out there that have the same ease of use as OE without the quirks?
Regards Stephen
Thunderbird
Seconded. Thunderbird for news/e-mail and Firefox for web browser.
Then there's Open Office
Only thing wrong with Thunderbird is that the kill file system doesn't seem to work too well, or am I missing something ?
Steve (on Thunderbird)
Try: rm -rf /.
(Oh, 'and on... did you mean killfile system and not kill 'the' file system...)
What ? You work as root all the time ?
Bloody Eunuchs gnus. Should all be bloody well hung.... Go on, you know you can't resist the punchline.
Steve
Outlook Express and oequotefix?
Stephen wrote
I use OE and don't top post, never have, so what's the problem? Just move the curser. You need the curser at the top to start so you can delete the last posters address and details to tidy it up as I have before you start your reply. I do agree OE, is easy to use, intuitive even, and none of the mail/newsreaders are perfect.
Download and install quotefix. It's bloody good and fixes lots of irregularities, some of which weren't caused by Outlook Express.
If I was still running Windows I'd still be using Outlook Express. Many people say it's crap but when set up correctly and in good hands it is very nice to use. Hideously out of date though.
I tried Pan for Windows but the runtime libraries it needed were very slow and made OE look lightning fast. That was last year which is decades ago in computing terms. One thing I like about Pan is that multipart posts are automatically shown as just one post with a green jigsaw piece to let you know all parts are valid.
You could also give Opera a try which is, er, different but shows promise. It is limited to 250 headers for the *first* download but this can be fiddled so it downloads all current headers. I like it in principle but the interface sucks and the whole thing needs a lot of work.
...and fanie spake unto the tribes of Usenet, saying...
I agree. I downloaded Free Agent a while ago after reading about it on here and used it for a day or two, but like you I found it a bit tiresome and not offering any advantage over OE. I'm sure it can do some clever tricks, but I don't really need them and I found the interface irritating.
OE with Quotefix does everything I need, so I'll probably stick with that.
I tried that on this PC and it said "'rm' is not recognised as an internal or external command". So feeling a bit miffed at your misinformation I tried it on the other PC and it made a funny disk accessing sound and then went off into la-la land and won't reboot any more. What should I do next to make it work properly again?
Have you ever tried that? Last time I tried it on Solaris it got as far as /lib then deleted library files that it had mapped into VM and the rm process fell over. Couldn't get anything else to work after that mind..
You need to restore it with the Windows machine. Boot to a DOS prompt from a bootable floppy and type something like format c: - ignore any silly warnings, these are left-overs from Windows 3.11, just say Yes whenever asked...
Yes. One of the most satisfying moments of my sad little life seeing
750,000 illegally input patient records whisp away into the ether...(Note to self: Must not read Neuromancer last thing at night...) :-)
Yer right tho', didn't kill the entire system, but what was left was pretty worthless.
It says Sun E4000 on the front of it and doesn't want to know about Windows. Any further suggestions?
Bob, you have changed my mind - this is the best rationale ever for OE acting the way it does - sadly it also requires a degree of 'clue' (which you obviously have) to understand that snipping is _good_ and top posting _bad_ (caveat - previous comments about it not really being such a total crime hereabouts lest someone sticks their heels in and demands the right to do so...) :-)
I like it because it doesn't have lots of tricks - does what I want a text based interface to a text based media to do, and has never fallen over in the 10+ odd years I've used it.
Mind, I often view the entire Internet as 'just text' which is a step up from viewing it as a series of 0s and 1s :-)
Ah, it was the
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Thunderbird/1.0.6 Mnenhy/0.6.0.104
that was fooling me ;-)
(I had to kill my Doze VM session earlier, when I restarted it, the pooter ran scandisk on the VM file)
Doze box here that's used for remote support of clients. A RedHat box at work running mail and web for a few clients, and the bloody E4000 humming away in my garage that I've just sucked a whole load of data off for a client and is on it's way to a new home. I'd always wondered what would *actually* happen with typing rm -rf /. and now I know. :-)
I hate it when that happens.
Does the full version of agent have an extra setting over the free one to automatically move to the end of a newsgroup when you swap between different groups?
Its really starting to annoy me that whenever i swap back to a.f.l from other groups i get the posts from 2003 (the earliest ones in my agent database) on screen and have to ctrl-end or scroll right back down again to get the newest ones.
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required