Using Thunderbird for Usenet

In article , Graeme scribeth thus

Windoze 7 what's that;?...

Never bothered with Yahoo groups as such the ones I use are all sent via e-mail..

Never tried it but I reckon you can do it..

There are folks out there who insist that [teco | EDT | Emacs | TPU | WS ]... are the only sensible key bindings as devised by God himself. So basically any choice a programmer makes will be wrong for some people. The better programmers allow for the end user to change the key bindings, so that if it really is an issue for a particular user then the user can change it.

However even that will not please some users, since they expect it to work in their preferred way (even when that may be less intuitive for the majority) and don't see why they should use the tools provided to configure it the way they want.

Not sure what one does about them.

So change next unread to u and forward to n and you are done. What's the problem.

Most folks are probably happy with n for next since its the option they will use most.

So when they give you user definable menus, button bars, shortcuts etc, in fact complete flexibility to tailor something to your needs, you think you are being treated as a lab rat?

Woa!, you seem to have lost the thread. We are talking about having back and forward buttons and reading news while controlling the app with the mouse (you can lay CTRL-H to bed for a bit now).

Thunderbird has these capabilities now so the fact that at some point in the past it did not is not relevant to this discussion.

I think its pretty good now. Certainly not perfect, but quite usable.

OE however is a liability and should be avoided IMHO. The fact that it uses a proprietary binary file format, combined with its bug that trashes its mail store when a file reaches et 2 gig boundary, alone is enough to preclude its use in my book. Being tied to the IE6 render engine and the fact that that is now end of life also precludes it as a sensible choice.

You seem to be rambling. Perhaps the implicit assumption that TB should emulate or be more like OE is the problem. I expect a good deal of the user base would not see that as a desirable goal.

They have been supported since before V2, and that has been out over three years. It was also in 1.5 IIRC.

And did what CP/M+ did in < 1MB

And was vastly inferior to the the fully real time and multi tasking QNX at under 1.4MB compressed onto a single floppy.

Well to an extent we the end users have elected to have it that way. We want software cheaply, which means dealing with the complexity of modern hardware and OS's in a sufficiently short time-scale to bring products to market. That means extensive reuse of code and application frameworks etc. The days of the individual coding the whole app in assembler are long since gone. So it takes a bit more ram - spend £20 and add another gig.

Hardly - excel was bought in basically working and just needed rebranding. Foxpro was lightly warmed over before shipping as a MS product (and stripping the core DB engine for use in access later)

WinNT was effective a re-writing of VMS by the former DEC OS team, and had little in common with Win9X beyond a tweaked version of the API glued on top.

They have limited resources and have to chose carefully where to spend those. TB was a less important target the FF - I am sure Moz would agree with that appraisal.

Netscape were not always in that situation. Then again they did have to content with a competitor attempting to put them out of business[1] using every trick in the book (legal or otherwise).

Note, not by producing a better product either. Bus still that is old history.

Even if you don't want it to?

That would really piss me off! (especially on groups like this where there is not always time to read all the new posts in one sitting, or where for that matter I might need to switch between groups and email etc for other reasons)

No, you must be wrong, according to Bill only the hallowed CTRL-H can save us! ;-)

Yup, personally I can see no attraction to reading replies out of the content of their thread - its just seems to make work for yourself.

Prolly a bit of a reply got added to a quoted section...

Alas for many usenet is a bit of an also ran, and does not get much attention.

(even this group is well down from its peak of 12k postings a month! - although that might not be a bad thing since it seemed half of those were dribble (or Tom if that is who he is now))

BillW50 wrote on Sat, 22 May 2010 14:09:23 -0500:

Hello John! Okay I just fired up all three versions of Thunderbird (1.5,

The sad news though the watch toggle is very limited under all of these versions of Thunderbird. As you can only do one thing with it. As you can only see only unread watched threads and that is all. You can't see or review already read watched threads or anything.

And all three versions the Message Filters are very limiting. None of them can see anything within a message itself. Not even the search will let you see inside of a message.

Say for example, months from now you recall somebody mentioning something about Turnpike. And at the time you were not really interested. But now you are. And there is nothing within Thunderbird at all that will help you find it.

I personally see Thunderbird having only a very limited feature set and that is all. And even some of the most basic features, makes you go through a lot of unnecessary work.

Take for example, I read from like 10 different servers. Many of the settings are the same for each one. Take the signature for example. Just to change the signature, I have to change all 10 of them from different servers. They could have made this all so much easier.

I've been using Agent since the middle 90s. (Got this particular upgrade in 2002.) Still downloads my songs, books and this very silly chatter just fine. What more could a fella want... ;)

In message , geoff writes

Ah. Thank you.

In message , tony sayer writes

Exactly. I too receive all Yahoo Group posts as e-mail. Turnpike reads them as Usenet posts, and threads them exactly as news, with a different folder for each group, and different threads within each group. Perfect.

One of the big problems when running applications under the old DOS days was everybody had their own key commands. Not a problem if you only ran one application all of the time. But if you ran other applications too, it would get really confusing.

One of the big promises when Windows first came out was the promise that all of this would become standardized. And if you learned how one application worked, you can work any other Windows application as well.

The problem is some did not stick with the same key command standard. So those of us who uses many different applications, this becomes very confusing.

But different applications uses different keys. So switching between applications actually makes you think or to look up which keys do what. And it is a real waste of time really.

No what I am saying they are only a tease. 3.0 has improved this greatly, so I have to say kudos there. But what had taken them so long? This should have been done since day one.

To see my watched messages under Thunderbird, I must only see them in a thread view and only unread threads. Why so limiting? Also to get there I must press ALT-V-E-W. Okay fine, but to get back the other view I like to use is to sort messages by date with the newest on top. Well that is a lot of work toggling between those two views under Thunderbird. It doesn't need to be this hard.

Every time I use Thunderbird it slows me down. Way too much work just to do just the simple things. Toggling between those two views I mentioned above is one good example.

I can see it being a concern for one. And I never saw a problem with the

Well since OE support is no more, there is a large group of users looking for a replacement. So some developer making an OE clone would probably get millions of users right away.

Yes you are right. I just checked. Very limited to what you can do with Watched though. As it must be threaded and unread threads at that and that is all you can do.

No doubt.

Well CP/M 2.2 was limited to 64KB of RAM. And CP/M 3 allowed for 128KB (maybe more in 64KB banks). And so an application could only use like

Sounds great. Although applications is what makes an OS, not an OS itself. You could design the world's best OS and it would be useless without the many applications to go with it.

Three decades ago I didn't see it that way and I still don't today. As many of the developers would purchase the latest and greatest and beefiest systems they could buy. Thus for most people, it was out of reach for them. I think it takes a lot for a developer to understand the latest and greatest shouldn't be your target. But the kind that most users actually has.

And they sold it to Microsoft why? Btw Excel was also available for OS/2 as well. I think it even came first before the Windows version.

Could be and probably.

Everybody has their favorites from the past. And I usually like the older versions far better than the newer versions. Such as I like OE6 far better than Windows Live Mail. I like the older versions of Thunderbird than the newer ones. I even like the older browsers than the newer ones. And I like Windows XP far better than I do with Vista and Windows 7. And the list goes on and on.

I am sure that FF has far more users than TB has. But it is clear which one they really don't put a lot of effort in.

Actually there was an interview on TV with both of the two guys who started Netscape (Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen). And they freely admitted that they pushed Microsoft right into that war. As they wanted to go head to head with Microsoft. And they fully believed whatever Microsoft could do, they could do better.

Those two admitted when they first saw IE4/OE4, they knew it was far better than anything that Netscape could ever produce and they knew Netscape was finished as a company.

Except the message body filter.

Where is that Rod? I don't see that under 1.5, 2.0, or 3.0.

BillW50 wrote on Sun, 23 May 2010 14:54:25 -0500:

Oops! You can actually see watched unread as unthreaded. Although it takes a lot of work to get there. And I only found it by accident.

I am running 3.0.4.

On what I have now seen is called the Mail toolbar. The right end of that has a box starting with a magnifying glass icon with a dropdown. Have a look here - but what I see isn't exactly like that.

Okay I see it and mine doesn't look like that either. I tried it and it couldn't find Turnpike. But I have Thunderbird set to not to download message bodies. So maybe that is why. OE6 can be set not to download message bodies either. But it stores them automatically if up opened them once or have them set as being watched. I like that a lot. Probably not a good idea if you have Internet access all of the time and are tight on disk space too.

It certainly does - I'm running it under Win 7-32 bit - and it installed without any problems.

One further question, if I may . . .

Where does Thunderbird keep its data? I would like to back up my accounts and messages - but can't find where it hides this stuff!

The situation has improved certainly - common dialogues tend to share keystrokes across apps. However it gets harder standardise beyond that, because the features are not standardised.

Well partly that is true. Not quite as true as on a mac perhaps, but then again the barrier to entry for a windows developer has never been that high, so software quality certainly varies!

True, but insisting that every app does it your favoured way will not fix that either.

True - and I tend to use the mouse for that one...

How often do you need to toggle between though?

Its fairly common these days a people use mail for storing far more stuff than they used to.

Well to be fair there are loads of mail packages about that predate OE. Turnpike, Pegasus, the Bat, Elm and others. MS did not really "get" the internet at all until about '95

Possibly... and TB will probably be a reasonable choice for many. However a good number will skip traditional email apps altogether and move straight to combined function clients on their phones etc that integrate IM, facebook, etc...

It could do 128K for apps, plus addition space for ram drives etc.

Indeed.

Well true, as former users of BEos or AmigaDos will happily attest!

A couple of decades ago I probably would have agreed. I used to lover Turbo Pascal 3 as a development environment - blazingly fast compiler, full editor, etc all in a 50K exe. It used to annoy me slightly that the run time system added 13K or overhead to a 1 line program, but it was worth it for the boost in productivity.

Add on sidekick for a pop up editor, advance trace 86, and MASM and you had a great low level development platform as well. Again all fitting nicely on a floppy with space to spare.

They made them an offer they could not refuse!

Personally I have never found a word processor that could beat WP51 under DOS with a task switcher - certainly not for technical documents anyway. ;-)

They have put less effort in historically - however they did announce about a year back that more effort was going to be put into TB to get it back up to date.

And to be fair they probably could. What they did not expect was the MS would give away the product so as to cut off their income stream at the knees. You look at the first IE (which was a fairly rough port of NCSA mosaic), and it did not look like much of a threat. (IIRC they stitched up the original developers of that quite nicely by signing what sounded like a very attractive licensing deal that guaranteed them a proportion of the sales volume!)

IE4 was way down the line after NS sales of browsers had fallen to almost nil. Their sole income was from the server side by that time, and that was being eroded from all sides.

Message body searches for news has historically been weaker in TB than for mail. It is in 3, although you get best results if you leave indexing turned on (the default - but hits performance on older platforms at least until the first run is completed)

The quick search version should work ok though.

(Failing that google!)

Unless you change it, it will default to :

:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\

In message , Rod writes

Excellent, thank you. Yes, broken threads are a problem even with Turnpike, although TP does at least treat the broken thread as a new thread within the same folder, which is logical.

Delighted to read that Thunderbird is able to search within saved messages, whether group, news or mail. That is a TP facility I use frequently.

xxx

Oh, whoops, I do that, So message threading isnt done by the subject line, but by some hidden code within the message?