[ale] "Good" Newsreader for GNOME/Ubuntu?

Michael B. Trausch fd0man at gmail.com
Thu Jul 13 01:55:02 EDT 2006


Okay, so I have been searching for something that seems to be pretty
elusive, for a little while.  I am trying to find the "perfect"
newsreader, which everyone seemingly has their own idea of.  Does
anybody know of a newsreader (preferably available via Ubuntu packages,
but if not, I have no issues building from source if the package will
actually build) that does all of the following?

 * View only threads that have unread messages in them, in addition
   to all threads.
 * Supports attachments and HTML posts, both reading and writing (I
   have to deal with lots of OE users in an online learning 
   environment).
 * Supports specifying non-standard ports OR supports NNTPS -- if it
   doesn't support NNTPS, I have to use non-standard ports because
   I would have to use stunnel to connect to (multiple) servers.
 * Has a "next read message" key or shortcut.
 * Things like plonking, scoring, etc. do not matter to me.

The readers that I have tried (and do not work for one reason or
another) are:

 * Evolution:  Supports HTML and Attachments, but doesn't seem to know
   to actually show "just threads with new messages."  I tried Evolution
   2.6.1, and doesn't support a "view next unread message," and doesn't
   show new messages in their thread context if you hide the previously
   read messages (which is problematic, considering the fact that these
   people constantly top-post, and remove context from conversations).
 * slrn: Doesn't support MIME messages, so no HTML and no attachment
   support without lots of work.
 * Pan: Doesn't support attachments, or clean reading of HTML posts.

Before I switched to Ubuntu and GNOME, I was using KNode, which supports
everything but the HTML viewing, which is kinda-sorta okay.  The
problem, though, is that the people involved have issues with things
like _underline_ *bold*, and /italic/ in the traditional text style.  I
honestly prefer plain text, but these people do not, and they can't seem
to wrap their minds around how plain text "formatting" and emphasis
work.  I did just find something called mahogany, but I am not sure how
that is going to fare.  If I can get it to build (right now, some
compiler error is being thrown and I can't figure out how to get around
it--back to my lack of C++ knowledge), I will attempt to give it a spin.

So far, the only other option that I know of would be to hack something
into another reader, but I am not proficient as a programmer, and so
that is rather hard to do for me.  If I could, I'd hack Pan to fix the
issues with it, because I like the rest of the interface, overall.  The
problem there, though, is that I am *definitely* not a C++ hacker, and
that is a showstopper for me, because I can't even wrap my mind around
the code that is there.

I could (theoretically) roll my own, using Python, though I would really
like to not reinvent the wheel if I don't have to.  I have started
playing with it thus far, and have started using the Python bindings for
wxWidgets, but the problem is that building all of this stuff is really
going slower then I can actually afford.  Paying someone to implement
functionality isn't an option for me, either, because I cannot afford to
pay someone a reasonable rate (or really, anything, right now) to
implement what I need (say, in Pan).

Any ideas?

	Thanks!
	Mike
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