Usenet Newsreader Conundrum

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Lurikrunch

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I've entirely switched over to my MacBook now, but I'm still having one problem: I can't find a good newsreader. On my PC I used a program called NewsRover, which I liked quite a bit. I've tried out a few newsreaders for Mac, the best one that I've found so far is MT-NewsWatcher, but it is missing one important feature. NewsRover would download headers and store them, and actually download the message only when I went to read the message. This does lead to utterly huge header files (I had almost a gigabyte of headers on a 45 day retention group once), but I far prefer that style of newsreading. MT-NewsWatcher does not store the headers, as far as I can tell, which is quite frustrating. Is there any way to configure MT-NewsWatcher to store the headers in this fashion, or can anyone suggest a Mac newsreader that does function in that fashion?


Thank you.
 
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If you create a Group within MT-NewsWatcher, and drag newsgroups from the Full Group List to your new group, MTNW will cache the headers even when you close the newsgroup. You can then save that file, and if you want to, can maintain more than one file at once for different sets of newsgroups. Is that what you meant?
 
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Hello:
I am not an intensive news user. For some occasional use I am happy with Entourage, the email and news component of Mac Office 2004. If you don't have Entourage you can also try OSXnews http://osxnews.sourceforge.net/new2/
 
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I believe UNISON will do what you want. I've been using MT-Newswatcher for years, but it won't do what you want. UNISON is not free, but is worth the money IMHO. I use UNISON for mass downloading non-graphic binaries, but it does what you want.
 
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Lurikrunch

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Hello again everyone, thank you for all of your suggestions. I ended up trying out Unison. At first I liked it, but now I'm dissapointed. After about 4 million headers, the .db file that Unison creates for the group becomes corrupted, or something similar. It won't let me view any of the stored headers, the only way to see more messages is to redownload the headers. Is there any way to fix this problem? Is it a Unison problem, and if so, should I start looking for an alternative newsreader?


Edit: It isn't a "marked as read" issue, I made sure of that.
 
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I generally only open up one or two big groups in Unison for the reasons you stated. I try to keep the headers under 2 million at a time, otherwise the machine will get bogged down. No way around it that I know of, other than to readjust the way you read the Newsgroups. Sorry. Not really many NewsReaders for OSX. I don't know if YA-Newswatcher was ever updated, but it was closely related to MT-Newswatcher (Open source code) so I don't think that will do you any good either.
 
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Opera is a web browser, but it also has a built in mail and news client.
 
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Operas News-reader capabilities are limited even compared to MT-Newswatcher. Netscape has the same ability, but I dumped it years ago for that reason.
 
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I've never used this function of it, but I know that Mozilla's Thunderbird email client also contains a news group client capability. If it is good as everything else about Thunderbird, you may be quite pleased.
 
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Lurikrunch

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The newsreader functionality in Thunderbird is quite good, but it isn't meant for binaries, I already tried it out. I decided to try out some of the other newsreaders on VersionTracker, and came across a little gem called iGrabNews. It's able to handle my 8-12 million header groups with ease, no slowdowns at all, and no corruption yet. It's designed specifically for binary downloading. iGrabNews and MT-NewsWatcher together fill all my needs for news, thanks for the help everyone!
 
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Hmmm...iGrabNews. I'll give it a try, thanks!
 

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