The only thing I liked about OE was that if I put someone in my killfile,
all their posts would be deleted.
Thunderbird did not have that feature and it originally did not even
have a way to delete the unwanted messages.
Thunderbird now has the ability to delete unwanted messages.
Other than that I don't see much difference between OE and TB
How do you read newsgroup posts in TB? Within the message pane (F8)
perhaps? I rarely read that way on any reader. I much prefer reading
them in a new window. Under TB I will sometimes open in a new tab, but
not very often. I wonder if multiple windows is why TB can be incredibly
slow for me?
I deleted everything in my news server folder as Paul suggested.
Although I also lost rules, watched, tagged, and star flags. Got rules
back by copying a file from a backup. So I will play around with it and
see if the freezes still occur. So far nothing really seriously slow
yet. Although this machine is pretty speedy, I should be trying this on
one of my Dell Latitude ST with the super slow Atom Z670 processors.
Dang thing only uses 8 watts (plugging it into a watt meter) total to
run the whole machine. No wonder it has no air vents or fans.
Here is what OE6 does that no other newsgroup reader can't seem to do
including WLM. As you know, when a new topic gets started. It can easily
start branching out to many subtopics. Some topics can branch out to
hundreds of many subtopics. And each subtopic can continue to branch out
to many more subtopics. Are you following me so far?
And I don't care if a newsgroup readers tags one subtopic by important,
watched, starred, or whatever. The method for marking them isn't very
important, just as long as you can see just them and ignore the rest. I
also want to be able to see either read and unread, or just unread of
these. For now anyway.
Since watched usually can do this for most readers, I'll use this as an
example. Say I setup a rule that any of my posts automatically gets the
watched flag. Under OE6, only my posts are marked as watched and any
posts that branches out from that subtopic, also automatically gets
flagged as watched. OE6 also has a view that allows you to see only
replies to your posts (CTRL-H) which basically does the very same
without rules or marking anything. WLM does have this view too.
The above is a huge help when you don't have a lot of time to spend on
newsgroup messages. As you quickly can see any questions, comments,
better solutions or anything to your posts. TB and all other readers are
terrible in this department.
Although OE6 even takes this much further. Not only can you mark your
own posts, but anybody, topic, subtopic, or anything you can think of.
Thus using rules or flagging any post you are interested in manually,
everything that branches from that one post also automatically gets
marked as watched.
I tried everything I can think of with TB to do something like this. And
I can't get it to work as well as OE6 can. Sure I could mark my posts as
important and give it the watched flag, but it only marks my posts as
important but no branches from that one post. And TB watched flag is
applied to the whole dang thread, which could contain thousands of
subthreads. Not very good at filtering just the posts you are most
interested in.
I don't know how OE6 actually pulls this magical trick off so well. But
I can think of a way that is so simple to pull off with any reader. That
is every header of every post contains an unique reference number. And
anything that branches from that one post will also list that same
reference number.
So the reader builds this list of reference numbers you want to follow
and having any header that lists one of these references gets flagged
for special viewing. It is so simple. Yet only OE6 pulls this off.
