Help--I need a new newsreader

[Pounds on Wood]

That's really all you needed to say :)

[Colin B.]

Yes, yes it is. I'm pretty comfortable with that.

Understood. My wife is an AutoCAD instructor, and AutoCAD doesn't run on anything else. I'm fully in favour of practicality winning over philosophy in most situations.

Well...no. It's not. All philosophical rants aside, it's just not a good newsreader or mail client. It's slow, buggy, unstable, badly organised, and encourages bad posting behaviour.

But that's all I'll say on the issue here. Suffice to say, I recommend Thunderbird as a usenet client to anyone. (Even though I'm a profound luddite, and use tin :-)

Colin

[Frank Boettcher]

Hmm, I guess what throws me off is when it comes up it clearly says "free agent" at the top of the page. I didn't know there was a predecessor. Was it full featured for free?

What you say about the disabled features not being hidden is accurate. However, I've used it for a long time without them, but may consider a change.

Frank

[Fred the Red Shirt]

You can say that all you want but that doesn't make it so. I'll explain again why it is not so:

It sounds like you never heard of the "Join the Crew Virus" or Windows XP. All of the Linuxes, Unixes, and OSX are more secure BY DESIGN. They were designed to NOT execute code sent to a machine over the internet by an anonymous third party. Microsoftware was DESIGNED to execute code sent to a computer over the internet by an anonymous third party.

"Join the Crew" was a chain letter circulated in the late

1980s or early 1990s about a supposed email virus that would infect your computer if you opened the email. System administrators had to keep reassuring their users that it was NOT possible to get a virus by reading email.

Then Microsoft discovered the internet and distributed email clients that DID make it possible to infect a computer by merely reading email, and in some cases just by receiving it, no need to even read it. NO OTHER OS did THAT!

They topped that with XP which required that the user make an insecure connection over the internet to com- plete the installation. NO OTHER OS DID THAT.

These were not the result fo the crackers getting smarter. Microsoft put onto the market with FEATURES, not bugs, that rendered them insecurable. Microsoft wrote operating systems that deliberately and by design allowed other parties to control a local computer over the internet WITHOUT the permission or even notification of the local user.

I cannot overstress the fact that these were not bugs. They were written to do EXACTLY what the crackers did with them, excepting for the specifics of the malicious applications.

That is only one reason why spam proliferates.

Another reason is that ISPs with good spam control on their own networks (AOL is one of these) play 'whack o' mole" trying to block spam, instead of simply refusing all internet traffic from networks that harbor spammers.

Contrary to popular belief, the ISPs that host most spammers are known and that information is published by the likes of SpamHaus. See the

top ten spam supporting ISP list, for example.

Verizon led the list for years as a consequence of buying spam-friendly MCI (formerly UUNET) , but has now dropped to #6.

BTW, more than three times as many spammers are hosted in the USA as in any other country. China is a distant second.

[Han]

Puckdropper wrote in news:47f4ff30$0$23857$ [e-mail]:

I would second the vote for Xnews. I used to use Netscape version 5 or so, but then it got sucky. For me Xnews was closest to what I was used to. It is free.

See also news.software.readers for help.

I use Verizon's newsserver (FiOS).

[Zz Yzx]

I'm very happy with Agent as well, but I'm not sure "Free Agent" is still available.

-Zz

[Tanus]

As someone else has mentioned, you'll also need a news server. Many you have to pay for, but I use a free one called aioe.org. It's not perfect, but I don't see a lot of spam in the Wreck. So it does some filtering. Whatever reader you settle on ( I also use Thunderbird from mozilla.org) can help you with what aioe lets through.

[Keith nuttle]

I used Netscape 7 for main years because of the browser and email. As previously said Netscape died. I Installed FireFox and Thunderbird. I have been very satisfied with both. I also installed the Thunderbird Lightening addin Again I am very satisfied.

Both work in ways like like the old Netscape.

[Leon]

Snip

Well I am sure that every thing you say here is true, today. But security be design is going to be cracked by some one. The strong point to all the other systems security is that 99% of the people spamming and sending out viruses are concentrating on the easy target. As long as other systems are not as widely useful as Windows the attraction is going to be low. Until another OS gets the attention that Windows does by the spammers no really knows what holes of methods can be devised in the future to cause havoc. To think that your set up is impenetrable is to be a bit naive.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Bullshit. After using OE for many years, listening to others recommendations I tried other newsreaders. I'm back to using OE and I'm sticking with it. Does everything I want it to do and at no cost. I like it so much I may just send Bill Gates a $20 bill as a thank you.

[Maxwell Lol]

There is currently a security hole in Windows 2000 and XP. You get two attachments a *.doc and a *.mdb (or *.asd) file. If you open the *.doc file, you get infected with a virus.

[Maxwell Lol]

Except when you screw up. The iPhone runs as superuser, and not an unpriviledged user. This is one reason why it was so easy to hack.

[Maxwell Lol]

I had the same problem with Linux years ago. It was a new install, and while downloading hte latest patches, it was compromised.

To be honest - both Vista and Linux systems have improved. Some just take longer than others...

Microsoft has a big problem - with a zillion users, you can't make people change their behavior without being flooded with complaints.

[Maxwell Lol]

two spaces. Actually it was an error in decoding uuencoded formated files that normally looked like this:

begin 444 filename but when the number was missing, it crashed, i.e.

begin filename

[Fred the Red Shirt]

messagenews: [e-mail]...

No, the strong point to all of the other systems is that they _have to be cracked_.

Abusers didn't have to crack Windows, they just used the available plug-ins.

Using Windows on the internet was like walking into a gay bar at closing time with your pants down around your ankles.

False dichotomy--like 'safe' or 'unsafe' in a woodshop.

[Larry Blanchard]

And me, for much the same reasons. But explaining that to a non-techie is a lost cause. With a great deal of persuasion you might get them to use Thunderbird.

There are applications that don't run under anything but Windows so I have it on my machine. But most of the time, and all the time I'm online, I use Linux. When I get the time I'm going to try WINE (Windows emulator) and see if the apps I use will run under it.

[Larry Blanchard]

Leon, the point he's trying to make is that spammers didn't have to devise any methods to get into Windows - Microsoft provided them :-).

AFAIK, that is not the case with any of the Unix variants. I wrote code to control, among other things, smelters, rolling mills, radio telescopes, and computer aided dispatch. All of them were concerned about security for obvious reasons, especially the highway patrol :-).

To put it another way, setting up an insecure Unix box takes a fair amount of work. Work that can only be done by someone with superuser authority. Setting up a secure Windows box takes a great amount of work and the result is a crippled system because many features must be disabled.

[Doug Winterburn]

Try vmware server on linux. Any windows apps you need will run with no problems. You can install windows and any windows apps that you might need. When your windows virtual machine gets hacked, just delete and reinstall. Your linux machine will be the none the worse for wear.

have it on my linux box running win2K, winXP and Solaris 10, all at the same time and with no performance issues. Memory is your friend - on a desktop with 2.5GB, I still don't have any paging issues.

Fortunately, the only windows apps I need are things like Taxcut and cutlist. So far, my virtual windows machines haven't been hacked, probably because of infrequent use and a good linux based firewall/nat/dns/dhcp linksys wireless router running the dd-wrt linux based firmware as well as the full suite of AVG protection tools.

[Mark & Juanita]

I'm using Crossover Office (a shell around WINE), some things work well, others not so well, and some not at all. For example, Lotus 123, TreePad and TaxAct work fine. I could not load TurboCAD, TaxCut, or MindManager. The Crossover web site

is pretty good in rating applications and has a fairly exhaustive list of what will work, what may work, and what won't.

[Mark & Juanita]

I looked into that, the problems I had were a) it requires buying a Windows license -- seems somewhat defeating of the purpose and b) having to re-compile the kernel to make it work with OpenSuse.

Someday, I may re-visit this if there is something that I absolutely have to run that doesn't have an alternative.