On 7/23/2011 8:05 PM, Laurie Forbes wrote:
Got my Thunderbird filters working (only passes rec.crafts.metalworking)
but unfortunately, most of the posts are still OT (and full of the
typical cretinous blather).

I fear this is hopeless - is there another metal working group (not
necessarily on Usenet) that anyone could recommend?

Laurie Forbes

I use Thunderbird too, and have for a long time.

You shouldn't need a filter to allow "only" a certain newsgroup. You
should only be getting messages from the newsgroups that you are
subscribed to...? You might need to generate and link to a screenshot to
explain this better.

--------

It was my understanding that the Thunderbird junk mail filters won't
work for newsgroup posts, unless you download the entire newsgroup post
list for offline browsing.
,,,,
Downloading a newsgroup for offline browsing takes a lot of download
time initially, even if you only choose the last 2000 or so
messages--but after that, it's relatively quick, since from then on it
only must download all the new messages since your last visit. -I don't
do it though, because the OT posts don't bother me too much.

I am not sure as I don't often use it,,, but I think you can do message
filtering if you access newsgroups through the Google Groups web-based
interface. -At least I think I've seen people on NG's say that you can...?
http://groups.google.com/

The junk filters for email (in Thunderbird) work pretty well.
I prefer to do junk-mail filtering on my own PC, so if anything expected
doesn't arrive I can just go looking in the 'junk mail' folder for it.
If your ISP is filtering stuff for you, you have no way to know what
didn't show up.

As to alternate metalworking forums, the two I visit the most are the
Chaski one, and Home Shop Machinist BBS. Practical Machinist only deals
with production-level equipment that most hobbyists don't have. CNCzone
is pretty nice if cnc is your thing, but it's not mine (not yet anyways).

There's a few Yahoo groups also (some general and some specialized on
certain machines or project types) but I dislike them just for Yahoo's
ancient groups interface, which dates from the dial-up era and quite
frankly sucks donkey genitals. The messages nest only 8 (?) or so levels
deep (so it's difficult to follow complex conversations) and it only
shows ten (?) messages per page.