Picks: A Roundup of Newsgroup Readers

Over the last few weeks I've gotten a lot of emails asking about newsgroup readers. So, here for your reading pleasure, is a roundup of some newsgroup software. Enjoy. -- Doc

Agent, by Forte is a powerful, first-rate newsreader and it's gotten progressively better over the years. Agent can handle multiple newsgroup servers, private newsgroups, and email. It can also deal with both text and binary newsgroups. It also comes with some impressive filtering power so you can get exactly what you want from the newsgroups you subscribe to. It provides the ability to have the program "pull" in content from multiple servers so you have optimum content with a Agent has a lot of configurable options and I always like that. You can have different personas for different newsgroups. That gives you a lot of flexibility. You can have an "official" personal for business and other, more informal personas for other things. The ability to do email makes Agent a killer package because you can have all your email and newsgroups in one application. I personally have run Agent from a USB drive for over 6 months with no problems at all. Keep in mind that this is not a documented feature, but it works for me. Take that for what it's worth. Agent is a powerful yet easy-to-use solution for both newsgroups and email. It's loaded with great features and lots of configurable options. You can customize it in so many ways including filters to route your information and different rules for different folders. The program also makes it very easy to find information that's in the program. Search for text in email or newsgroups and find what you're looking for! Give it a try, I recommend it.

System Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP

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Newsman Pro, by NewsMan Pro is another full-featured newsgroup reader that I like a lot. In particular I really like it's clean and easy-to-use interface. You can even customize the way it looks using its built-in "themes." For anyone that uses a server that imposes limits on the amount you can download this is a program you need to look at. You can set it up so it will automatically stop the download when your limit is reached - pretty cool. Oh, and did I mention that it will also restart when you're able to get more? The program also has a very nice scheduler in the full or non-freeware version. That allows you to have NewsMan Pro go get your news for you, while you sleep perhaps. NewsMan Pro has a number of neat features that I haven't seen in similar programs. It's "Automation Rules" function is cool because it will find articles you might be interested in by using keywords or key phrases that you define. When the program goes off to check news headers it "watches" your rules and snags anything that might be of interest. A nice feature to have. I found that I could gradually refine my rules based on what NewsMan Pro brought back. NewsMan Pro can deal with both binary and text newsgroups. The program comes with a built-in database that allows you to store messages for as long as you like. I think that's a great feature and it also makes it easy to find things. Another cool feature is the way the program handles binary attachments. Supporting UUE, MIME, and Yenc encoding, the program decodes attachments as you download them, saving them in a folder you've assigned. Another nice feature is the ability to support multiple news servers, which some similar products don't allow. On top of that you can even assign a priority to each newsgroup server. All servers with a priority go into a pool and are treated as one server. NewsMan Pro is simply loaded with cool and useful features and lots of configurable option. Give it a try for yourself and see what I mean.

System Requirements: Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista

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Ozum, by Oz Insight Pty Ltd is yet another cool newsgroup reader that's loaded with neat features. In fact, this product has so many cool features and functions that I can't possibly cover them all here, but I will try to cover some of the high points. Most newsgroup readers do okay with text, but they don't tend to do well if media is involved. Trying doing things with audio, video, or graphics and some newsgroup readers will choke. Not Ozum! It was built to do newsgroups and do a great job working with media as well. One very slick feature is a built-in "cross group" search capability that will find what you're looking for if it's available. Put what you're looking for in the search interface and Ozum snags it for you. Impressive! Ozum is an extremely powerful program for dealing with newsgroups. I've evaluated just about every newsgroup reader out there and none of them have the multi-media functions I found in Ozum. One unbelievable feature is the ability to actually preview just a part of any multiple part audio or video clips. The program can handle a huge range of file formats including, MP3, MPG, MPEG, AVI, ASF, WAV, and more. And what's possibly more impressive is that it automatically pulls in the files and decompresses them regardless of format. It can even unpack RAR format files and allows you to "look" inside them. Some of the power of Ozum comes from the fact that it's a true multithreaded application. Ozum is fast and has lots of power under-the-hood. At the same time it's easy-to-use. Give it a try, I recommend it.

System Requirements: Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista

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NewsWolf, by www.netwu.com is kind of unique in the realm of newsgroup readers because it actually goes out and finds free news feeds. Actually, in testing it out, I was surprised that it worked so well at sniffing out possible free news servers. Apparently the program keeps a database of potential target and then goes out to try to get you the news you want. One cool feature is that when NewsWolf does find a likely site it begins a login so it can determine if it's the real thing. Cool. If you find information you're interested in the program will gather it up for you and save it as a file, which you can easily browse. Since it's so unique I felt it was worthy of mention. If you're in search of free newsgroups, this is the program you need to look at.

System Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/2003/XP

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If you have a question on how to do something on the computer you can ask me and I'll review some software that will give you a solution to your problem. You can email me by clicking HERE You may not receive a reply, but all requests will be considered.