Hang about guys, I just realised (remembered) why I never started using Thunderbird before. IT IS VERY DIFFICULT?

Importing Google Groups is stupid. Get a Blocknews, EternalSeptemer, or similar account. T-Bird is easy to setup to read the groups.

Another free USENET provider that has a fairly wide selection of groups that I've used on occasion is:

paganini.bofh.team

On 04 Jan 2024, Amanda Ripanykhazova snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in alt.home.repair:

gContactSync is not Thunderbird, it's an Add-on for Thunderbird. Its purpose is to synchronize contacts between Google and Thunderbird - it has nothing to do with Google Groups. It's basic functionality is now built into Thunderbird. It hasn't been updated since 2019 and doesn't work with recent versions.

LIttle do poepole know that all my posts for the last 6 months are AI generated.

That explains a lot.

Sorry, I thought I had explained, the major point of my 'question' was the bit where I said that the instructions were AI generated! By that I meant to say as a minor point of my post that the instructions may look slightly difficult; but the major point of the post was to elicit some general hilarity at how AI can get things wrong by simply trawling around the internet looking for possible answers to some wrong question.

Anyway, I have set up T'Bird now to read NG messages and have moved on to trying ti figure out why I can't reply to messages without getting an IMPROPERLY CONFIGURED OUTGOING NEWSGROUP error message.

( I also discovered that the POST button has only disappeared from Chrome, not Firefox)

I thought they were more intelligent than usual.

In reply to "Amanda Ripanykhazova" who wrote the following:

It's great caving in and getting a 15 month Eweka account, posts from close to

So, everything is OK, everything configures itself and all I need to learn is to use the FOLLOWUP button to respond to something someone has said in a thread I am watching?

Yes, unless you want to only communicate with the posting individual privately. Then, you can use REPLY if they have given a valid email address in their post.

Thanks again for that. My last message was sent using Thunderbird/followup. But I still have to get the configuration right because out-of-the-box everything in Thunderbird seems reversed from the intuitive! Messages don't seem to be threaded, listings are sorted ascending rather than descending and while postings appear immediately (like GGroups), followups don't seem to appear until 10-15 minutes after posting

Go to the "View" tab to change thread settings. Click on the "Date" header on the date column on your Thunderbird page to reverse the order. You can also do the same to sort alphabetically on the Subject or From columns.