Interesting comment. I too am using Turnpike, but mentally preparing for the day when I will no longer be able to do so. Whilst there are many Turnpike features I'm sure I would miss, the most important feature to me is the ability to properly thread both Usenet AND mailing lists - Yahoo, etc.
Does Thunderbird have that facility, does anyone know? Or Agent, or ...?
If you create a desktop shortcut to the main Outlook Express exe (msimn.exe)* and edit the target field in the property sheet with [space]/newsonly at the end
formatting link
becomes a dedicated newsreader (still crap though).
*Microsoft Internet Mail & News, apparently
I had both Thunderbird and Agent running at the same time, and (for some reason) seemed to concentrate mainly on Thunderbird (which I've still got running). Both give you a choice in how you can display the threads etc, and they can be set to be pretty well the same as Turnpike.
I'd certainly give Thunderbird a try. You can run it in parallel with Turnpike - just ensure that you tell it not to delete anything from the server(s). Like Turnpike, you do need to play around a bit with the general configuration (which is all part of the fun). One thing it (apparently) lacks is the ability to use different news servers for different newsgroups. Another (inexplicably) is an inability to manually delete newsgroup postings (but there's an easy fix for this in the configuration files). However, I haven't yet found any obvious show-stoppers.
Thunderbird can't automatically filter out cross posted messages to more than a user defined number of groups. Some groups that look clean using Agent appear saturated with trolling when using Thunderbird.
You'll need to 'play with the knobs' a bit in order to get the best out of it. If you find something that TP does and TB doesn't, TB probably actually does do it (or a good approximation to it), if you know where to tell it.
I found setting the fonts confusing and unpredictable - but eventually, by trial and error, I got things more or less as I liked.
There is no option given for manually deleting newsgroup postings - but there is an easy fix:
If you ever want to totally uninstall TB, note that the database records are NOT removed. You need to do this manually (just delete). It's in the instructions (somewhere), or here (item 5).
If you don't delete those records, and re-install any version of TB at some time in the future, it will install fully configured using the information it already has (which may not be what you want it to do).
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