Using Thunderbird for Usenet

Somewhere on teh intarwebs BillW50 wrote: [snip]

Going slightly away from the subject here, I use Tbird as my email client and it really annoys me that, after it asks me if I want to download remote content in an email, it doesn't store it, not even for that session.

So if I'm checking prices for components in a weekly 'specials' email from a supplier (I tend to keep each weekly email in my inbox until I get the next one from the same company, then I delete last week's one) and click to another email next time I want to look back at that email again it re-downloads all of the graphical (etcetera) content. That can be a real PITA if you're off line at the time or have limied conection as some organisations like to send lots of pretty pictures in their (or linked to their) emails. It can chew through data pretty quickly.

Reply to
~misfit~
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Have not gone very far in checking, but have just gone to some old emails of exactly the type you mention, and pictures are there - or they download instantly without asking. (Lidl ones are what I just checked.) Oddly - only the ones since sometime in December 2009. Earlier ones are as you described - bereft of pictures.

Reply to
Rod

Tbird 'remembers' if you said yes the first time you opened the mail and then just downloads remote content.

I've just spent more time than I'd have liked looking for a setting to tell it to keep the data so it doesn't have to re-download it but I'm fusked if I can find out how to do that.

That's another problem with it not keeping the pictures etc. It can only do that as long as they're still on the server. Therefore 'archived' emails may in fact be useless, which is why I'd love to be able to change the settings.

Reply to
~misfit~

You need to setup whatever folder(s) you want for offline reading. Then it will store them on the computer.

Reply to
BillW50

Oh? Maybe that is where I went wrong. Seemed to work well for the newsgroups already there. But new ones later doesn't seem to be working correctly. Boy that is a lot of work with lots of newsgroups.

Okay I never think of that as OE6 does the same, but marks them as ignore. But they are still there and all.

I'll start using it your way and that will probably work much better. ;-)

Oh okay.

OE seems so very efficient compared to other programs. As other programs seem to make the user go through so much work and it really shouldn't be that way.

Reply to
BillW50

Yup, very! ;-)

Reply to
BillW50

If you call up the list of filters you should see a different list depending on which group is selected. In TB3 you can use the news server drop down box to also pick the relevant group - you will note there is a sub menu that splits out from server.

You can cheat a little if you want some filters duplicated, since all TBs config files are plain text, you can pop into the News folder in your profile and you will see a .dat file for each group - so for this one I have uk.d-i-y.dat and in there are all the filter rules. You can either copy this whole file to .dat to duplicate them for another group or cut'n'past individual rules in a normal text editor.

Oddly I find OE hugely frustrating - it must be it just does not work the way I think! Probably tells you something about either it or me ;-)

Reply to
John Rumm

Yes I see it.

Oh that is very handy! Thanks!

I can see and understand this. As There is the MS way of doing things and then there is the everybody else way of doing things. They are two completely different systems of doing things. And doing it the MS way does take a bit of a learning curve. And it is much harder the more you know of the other ways. In the long run though, I find it far more productive.

One really annoying thing about OE was quoting. Although there is OE-QuoteFix which has taken care of that one. And I won't personally use OE without it.

formatting link

Reply to
BillW50

Besides selecting whole folders, you can download starred and selected messages too under File -> Offline. So to download all watched in a newsgroup, you have to view only unread watched and select them all and then download. Nothing as nice as OE, but somewhat usable.

Reply to
BillW50

I suspect its down to the way MS focus group test stuff and observe how users use things. As a result they often come at problems a different way or leave out subtle bits of functionality that some find confusing. It can make things easier to learn for novice users, but frequently also frustrates power users. The office "ribbon" being a good example. Users with no exposure to office style apps often find it easier to learn, but anyone used to another way of doing it (including previous users of MS office) find it difficult.

(kind of like the opposite of Adobe with say photoshop - they will often go about a common feature in a way that seems more complicated than the others, but also in a way that opens up a whole new layer of extra power and flexibility for those who invest the time and effort really getting to understand what they are doing).

phantom attachment problem though?

Reply to
John Rumm

Yeah, I looked at that but it seems that it would then download remote content for every message. I don't want to do that, some of the weekly emails I get, if I'm not in need of their wares that week, I delete without reading / downloading the 'remote content'.

Oh well, it's better than the last email client I was using until the end of last year; Calypso 3. That is abandonware that did everything I wanted until I needed to use SSL for one or more of the accounts I check and it doesn't do SSL. :-(

Reply to
~misfit~

There is a lot of truth to what you say. And the MS way can cause problems to the power users. But then again, there is usually undocumented solutions to those problems. So that is really a tough call I agree.

But get this, I remember there was a survey about office suites. And I don't remember the exact number, but it was like only 20% of the features was known among business users. I would have guessed 80%, but no. So I guess the masses don't really use most of the features of a given application anyway.

I think MS knows this too. And I believe they use this to their advantage. So we end up with either the MS way and/or the other way. And since most people it seems don't use all or even most of the features of an application, the MS way is easier for most.

Phantom attachment? Is that the same as that syntax error in the MIME attachment that had hidden it in OE? And when the user opened the email (or newsgroup post I suppose) OE didn't see or show it but it would automatically run it in the background?

Well AFAIK this was fixed long ago. Even then AFAIK the following would foil this. One was to view messages in plain text. And secondly (now the default) was to treat attachments in the restricted zone instead of the Internet zone. And the restricted zone would warn you before OE does anything stupid.

The other problem that I recall about OE was as attachment could claim it was something normally harmless like a txt file or something in the MIME header. And when you open it up, it could be totally different and could be really an exe file for example and Windows would execute it.

I believe this has been fixed too. But the work around is and is probably still a very good idea anyway is to save the attachment. And the name better end up as a txt type for example. If it isn't, something is wrong. ;-)

Reply to
BillW50

You saw my later post that you can select them manually too, right? If possible, I can see selecting the view of the messages you want to download (like unread watched for example) and then selecting them all should work pretty well (well that example is already there in Offline, but you get the idea).

Reply to
BillW50

Indeed! Computer/Technology journalist the late Guy Kewney had a saying of computer software some years back along the lines of "People are in the habit of demanding tomorrows technology today, when in reality most of them would be incapable of using yesterdays technology next week"

It always makes me smile when Steve Ballmer attempts to downplay open office with the accusation that it only has the feature set of Office XP. Quietly sidestepping the issue that for a vast swathe of their user base that was more than adequate!

No, I was thinking of its incomplete decoding of mime headers that would cause it to think that there was a broken attachment on a post when a line began:

begin something...

it took the "begin" as a mime header.

That was actually a powerfully dumb default that it inherited from windows (and I can't believe they have still not fixed it!), where a double file extension such as picture.jpg.exe would be truncated for display to "picture", and given the default .jpg handler's icon. However when opened it would be treated as the .exe it really was.

The whole reliance on file extensions for identifying file content and associated apps is very 1970's anyway!

Reply to
John Rumm

I don't know why people use OE at all. It hasn't been maintained for years and was replaced by windows live mail. WLM has the same looks but has most of the OE bugs fixed. It is a lot easier and nicer to use than TB and agent and others I have tried and forgotten about as they were so poor.

Reply to
dennis

I do. ;-)

WLM hasn't been updated in years either. As it seems like the updates between OE6 and WLM stopped just months apart from one another.

Actually it has a new interface which is somewhat nice. Although they separated email from newsgroups. Now instead of glancing at one window if anything new came in, You have to toggle between email and newsgroups. Which is more work.

WLM also broke the account view. And you no longer can select more than one newsgroup (or folders in the case of email) and change all the sync settings all at one time. Now it is a real pain in the neck to do.

And the worst thing IMHO about OE and WLM is the poor quoting. At least there is OE-QuoteFix that takes care of OE. But there is yet a WLM-QuoteFix.

The only real good thing I like about WLM is you can't run OE6 on Vista or Windows 7 machines. But WLM can. ;-)

I agree there. I don't know why others make things so hard to do some of the most basic tasks. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Reply to
BillW50
8<

My WLM was updated late last year.

Not here. I have email and two news servers that all appear in the same pane on the left.

I didn't know you could do that in OE.

I don't usually have a problem with quoting, well nothing that OEQuoteFix fixed.

They are written by programmers for themselves and other programmers. They don't think about users much.

Reply to
dennis

And they've started dropping some of the 80%. Office 2007 no longer supports routing slips which were central to passing certain documents around our office.

MBQ

Reply to
Man at B&Q

That is a great quote! lol

Which is also funny, since I like MS Office 2000 the best out of all of the Office versions. I probably would like MS Office 98 a lot too, but it crashed and burned a lot. Instead of fixing it, MS had you to get MS Office 2000 instead which is stable IMHO.

I have two beefs with Open Office though. MS Word 2000 for example has four views:

Normal Web Layout Print Layout Outline

Open Office only has Web and Print views (OO calls them different of course). But I use the normal view the most and OO doesn't have it.

The other beef I have about OO is the lack of change case. Upper and lower case is there, but sentence and title case is not. Later I learned that OO does have sentence case, but they buried it somewhere else. But title case which I use all of the time, OO doesn't have that at all.

Oh okay. Well TB pops up a box every time I type attachment. As it thinks I want to add one into this post. So what other keywords can you type to cause other boxes to pop up?

Well I don't know why Microsoft doesn't fix some stuff? Well I kind of do. As I had a beef with them say around '84 about some bug in their MS-DOS that would show up if you were a software developer.

Well it turns out that MS knew about it and they were not going to fix it. And the reason was that other software developers already found what I found. And they coded their programs around the bug. And MS claimed if they fixed the bug, it would break thousands and thousands of programs already written.

Well I can see their point. But at least some stuff really does need to be really fixed right. I dunno, maybe the CIA and FBI uses this as a backdoor to break into dumb criminals computers.

I always save attachments anyway. And open them up with a hex editor to see what it really is anyway. Thus the whole problem is avoided.

Well I started with computers in the 70's and I still kind of like it. So what do you think works better? Having a header included with all files that tells what kind of file it is? Works except when you want to view a directory of files and the mass storage device has to look up every single file in the list to find out what type of file it is.

CBM-DOS used a different method. Somewhat like the extension idea, but rather stored the type just after the file name in the directory. And if the file type ever ended up being wrong, it was not as easy as changing the file extension.

Another thing about file extensions that I like is that they are easy to change. For example, some drivers, games, programs, etc. install autorun stuff that you may not need or want. At least running all of the time.

And for these, I add my own second extension. Say like Manager.exe to Manager.exe.disabled. Now it is dead in the water and can't start and it is out of the way. ;-)

For DOS machines I did the same, except it was also used as a RecycleBin too. Instead of deleting files that I wasn't sure I would need again. I would change the extension to .DEL. Say a file called data.txt I renamed to data_txt.del. And when space started to run low, I would delete all or some DEL file types. ;-)

Reply to
BillW50

Don't know what the canonical list is, but "enclosed" triggers it as well. The attachment thing was new in TB3 IIRC - presumably in response to the number of times you end up getting a second email entitled "This time with attachment!".

Yup, I still have a copy of "undocumented DOS" sat on the shelf - full of all the little hacks that they would not dare change because all their software used them, but at the same time they would not make an official part of the API.

Perhaps - I suspect they have better ways for the not so dumb criminals though!

The two options that seemed to work reasonably were the system used on the Amiga where for files intended to be launched by clicking etc there was an additional .info file. This contained the icon, a link to the application needed to open it, and toolypes (parameters or environment variables effectively), plus a few other capabilities. The downside was an extra file to shift about but it gave good flexibility, freedom from things fighting over extension associations etc. You could also then look at a folder at several levels - say choosing to not see all the minor files without info files.

The Mac approach was/is similar - but the extra information is encoded within a separate fork of the file (multiple forks being a concept supported but under used on NTFS as well interestingly)

IIRC BEos also had quite a sophisticated system, but that relied on the clever relational file system it was based on (like the one MS were building for Vistam or not as it turned out!)

If you go back to their intelligent GCR encoded floppies etc then there were only really 4 files types (prg, seq, usr, rel) - and that was more a statement of architecture than an indication of the app that would handle them.

Disabling autorun altogether works for me! ;-)

VMS used to be quite nice to work with in that respect. Files had names, and versions. So every time you overwrote a file it was actually recorded as a new version. So main.c;1 would get edited, and you would then have main.c;2 etc. You can then go back to any previous version at any time by deleting the most recent or fully specifying the version in the file name etc. When you were happy to wipe the older versions you just did a "purge" command to erase all but the last (or specified number of) generations.

Reply to
John Rumm

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