On Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:24:47 -0400, "Percival P. Cassidy"
wrote:

On 07/03/11 04:46 pm, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:

Straight question.

What is the purpose of paying for a newsreader?

There are many free newsreaders out there. Agent is the only one I know of
that isn't free.

Thunderbird (email and news) or SeaMonkey (email, news and browser) both
from Mozilla, are free.

I tried SeaMonkey. It was too bloated and slow. I use Thunderbird, instead
of Agent, for email primarily because it uses a standard file format. I lost
almost ten years of email history and address books when I could no longer use
the email program I was using.

Is it to access news groups?

Umm...

For that purpose, is Google really so awful?

Yes.

Esp, for people who visit only a few NGs?

Yes, but you're talking about two different things.

newsreader news (NNTP) server

(Note: I had one of the BEST email clients for years -- Forte Agent.

Agent isn't an email client, though it will do that too. I don't particularly
like it for email, though I use it for news.

Swift, powerful, sophisticated.
But when they discontinued NG access, I went to a Web-based email
client.

Why would you *ever* use web email? Gack!

Hear! Hear! I am a member of dozens of Yahoo! groups but always have
messages as individual emails to my computer, where Thunderbird filters
them into folders depending on the criteria I set.

My ISP dropped newsgroups, but I can still get most of them _via_
eternal-september.org, which is free. news.individual.net retains
messages longer and costs the vast sum of 10 Euros/year -- about US$14
right now.

I have separate folders for each newsgroup.

If you have Individual (I've used them for about six years), why use email for
news?