On 2015-08-29, Neon John wrote:

[ ... ]

On the reader side, I've used just about everything out there, both
for windoze and Linux. Agent is simply the best. It's a windoze
program but they make sure it continues to run under WINE for us Linux
types.

It's kill-file feature is probably its best. It employs a basic
proprietary system for making simple filters and conventional regular
expressions for more complex filters. The only thing missing is being
able to filter on content. I hope that comes on the next upgrade.

My newsreader, slrn, can do some of that -- but it does a
tremendous job of slowing down starting in a given newsgroup. This is
because the nntp servers offer a selected group of headers which can be
used in filters (as well as showing the list of articles, posters, and
subject lines for selection of *what* to read), and those go quite fast.

To filter on anything else (especially content) requires
downloading *all* of each article for filtering -- and then later
downloading *all* of each article which you select to read yet again.
The delay from the latter is not noticeable, as anything other than a
binary is unlikely to be large enough to take a significant time to
download -- but the first scan (all unread articles) if it is required
to download everything for all of the articles just to filter them, can
take quite a while.

In particular, I had to drop filtering on the "Newsgroups: "
header, because that forced it to download everything. That particular
header is not included in the summary of headers offered by the news
server.

For fairly quite nesgroups, there were not enough to be a
problem, and back when I ran my own news server, everything was already
on a local system, so the downloading of full articles for filtering was
a lot quicker. (T1 feed vs even 10BaseT, let alone 100BaseT local
ethernet.)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Remove oil spill source from e-mail
Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---