Ken, you are quite correct, but there are differences in the
default
behavior of a Usenet reader and Outlook Express. As you should
know,
being a MVP, Outlook Express does not handle replies like a
typical
Usenet reader would without a little work, and most people
don't even
know about Usenet let alone how to make OE work like a typical
Usenet
reader.
Although there's certainly truth in what you say, I guess I care
less about how typical it is than you do. To me what's important
is how well it meets your needs.
I *like* Outlook Express as a newsreader. Many people will tell
you that Agent, for example, is much better than OE for reading
news. I started out using Agent, liked it well enough, but
switched to OE because I tried it and preferred it.
Don't get me wrong here; I'm not trying to persuade you or anyone
else to convert to OE. I'm simply pointing out that my choice
works well for *me*. To mention just a couple of examples, I use
multiple servers, which is much easier to deal with in OE than in
Agent. I don't do binary newsgroups (where OE doesn't do well),
and so on.
My opinion is based on using Usenet for more than 20 years,
Your 20 years is more than double my 10 or so years, but my 10
years is more than enough so that I'm far from a beginner.
Microsoft
products since DOS came out,
You beat me by a few years again. I started using Microsoft
products in 1987.
and also many other products that have
many other features.
But when it comes to computing in general, I probably beat you by
a lot. I've been using computers since 1962, when I first started
as a programmer.
But regardless who has more experience in which areas, it doesn't
matter. You don't measure the worth of someone's opinion simply
by the number of years experience he has.
I would never suggest, to anyone, that they use
OE for Usenet (or Netscape or ThunderBird).
I have very little experience with with Netscape or Thunderbird,
and have no opinions about them. But I *do* recommend to people
that they use OE for newsgroups, primarily because all Windows
users have it on their machines, they probably already use it for
E-mail and have acquired some degree of comfort with it, and it's
a very easy way to get started. Once they've gotten started, and
are comfortable using newsgroups with a newsreader (instead of,
for example, the dreaded Microsoft CDO interface), I might then
recomend that they explore some alternatives and compare them
with OE to see if they might find something that suits them
better.
I like to see people use
the properly designed tool for the job, not something that had
a
feature appended after the fact.
To me, whether or not the feature was appended after the fact is
irrelevant. The only issue is how well it does the job, with "the
job" being defined as the individual user defines it--the subset
of newreading tasks that are important to *you*.
And, by the way, I don't use OE as an E-mail client, because I
have a different preference there.
