Anecdotes on good free mail & news reader for Windows2000?

[Dubious Dude]

I've been using Thunderbird til now, and have been generally quite
happy about its functionality. On a few occassions, however, I
experienced corruption while compacting. The last time was
particularly serious, with the entire Inbox disappearing from my file
system. I will try the upgrade, but I was wondering if someone could
suggest a comparable email/news reader to try, too? Something that
has similar organization would be interesting. Here are the features
I like about TB:

* Free
* Hierarchical folders, easily moved around
* Reasonable search facility, both heavy duty search through the
folder tree, and light filtering of the currently viewed folder
* Identity management
* Threaded news reading
* Filters
* You can limit the size of messages downloaded
* View source

Thanks for any suggestions of similar readers. Of course, robustness
is very important. For example, if I spend an entire evening cleaning
out most of my Inbox, I don't want to have to revert back to an
earlier version simply because a corruption forces me to erase the
summary file that keeps track of the messages removed from Inbox.
From experience, I know that cleaning out the Inbox a 2nd time is many
times more time-consuming than the first time, since I'd have to look
for duplicate messages in the destination folders where I put messages
taken from Inbox. It is, however, preferable to losing the Inbox
altogether.

I want to emphasize that, being free, TB is a remarkable product with
very complete functionality. I'm looking at alternatives because the
set backs can be extremely costly in terms of time. I understand that
not everyone encounters these, and I'm also aware that there is quite
possibly no application (especialy freeware) which can be completely
free of these hazards. Your anecdotes on the reliability of
alternative apps are much appreciated, as are your opinions on their
functional similarity with TB.

 

[dg]

* Free
* Hierarchical folders, easily moved around
* Reasonable search facility, both heavy duty search through the
folder tree, and light filtering of the currently viewed folder
* Identity management
* Threaded news reading
* Filters
* You can limit the size of messages downloaded
* View source

The only free newsreaders I know of with all these features besides TB
(which I'm using now) are Outlook Express and Dialog
<http://www.40tude.com/dialog/>, I've never used either for any period
of time.

The 2 main Windows based newsreaders I've used a lot besides TB are
Xnews and Gravity - neither of which meets all your criteria. Xnews has
folders, but the archive folder structure is flat - not hierarchical.
Gravity has all the features you request except folders - which it
doesn't have at all. To save articles, you "Keep" them in their
newsgroup folder, or save (append) them to files saved on your hard disk.

I wish there were more choices, but that's it as far as I know. For what
it's worth, I have a similar list of criteria to yours and have settled
on Thunderbird. I'm using v1.5 heavily for newsgroups (not email) and
haven't experienced any corruption.

HTH!

 

[Anonymous]

dg brought next idea :

The only free newsreaders I know of with all these features besides TB (which
I'm using now) are Outlook Express and Dialog
<http://www.40tude.com/dialog/>, I've never used either for any period of
time.

MesNews does all this too---and it can decode Yenc all by itself with
no third party add-ins. http://www.mesnews.net/chargement-gb.php

 

[Dubious Dude]

The only free newsreaders I know of with all these features besides TB
(which I'm using now) are Outlook Express and Dialog
<http://www.40tude.com/dialog/>, I've never used either for any period
of time.

Thanks for pointing them out.

The 2 main Windows based newsreaders I've used a lot besides TB are
Xnews and Gravity - neither of which meets all your criteria. Xnews has
folders, but the archive folder structure is flat - not hierarchical.
Gravity has all the features you request except folders - which it
doesn't have at all. To save articles, you "Keep" them in their
newsgroup folder, or save (append) them to files saved on your hard disk.

I wish there were more choices, but that's it as far as I know. For what
it's worth, I have a similar list of criteria to yours and have settled
on Thunderbird. I'm using v1.5 heavily for newsgroups (not email) and
haven't experienced any corruption.

HTH!

It certainly does. I'll give 1.5 a go. I'll also compact mail boxes
seldomly, and make a backup before hand. Though it is really strange
that this is necessary. The thing is, I've gone through many versions
of netscape, mozilla, and now thunderbird. Over the years, I have
learned that this corruption is endemic to compaction in this family
tree of mail readers. Not just on one type of computer system or OS,
either. So when I trashed that 350KB message from the Inbox and went
to do compaction, a voice was telling me "Listen, Bud, you KNOW you
better backup first". I responded "I don't have time for that.
Besides, this is Thunderbird, things have cleaned up." I should'a
listened. Though you never know, if you listen to all instances of
the Disembodied Voice, you end up doing nothing but laying down safety
nets.

 

[Tristan Miller]

Greetings.

* Free
* Hierarchical folders, easily moved around
* Reasonable search facility, both heavy duty search through the
folder tree, and light filtering of the currently viewed folder
* Identity management
* Threaded news reading
* Filters
* You can limit the size of messages downloaded
* View source

Thanks for any suggestions of similar readers.

I've been using KNode, which has all of the above features except
hierarchical folders. I don't think it's available for Windows 2000, but
if you have high-speed network access to a remote GNU/Linux system, then
you could access it via an X server on your Windows 2000 machine.

Regards,
Tristan

 

[Al Klein]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:32:29 +0000, Tristan Miller

[piggybacking]
Free Agent. Sort of hierarchical folders - 2 levels.

 

[Craig]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:32:29 +0000, Tristan Miller

[piggybacking]


Free Agent. Sort of hierarchical folders - 2 levels.

The mail/news agents for Mozilla 1.7.12 & Seamonkey 1.0 do this.

hth,
-Craig